How Identifiable Are You On the Web? 160
An anonymous reader writes How identifiable are you on the web? This updated browser fingerprinting tool implements the current state of the art in browser fingerprinting techniques(including canvas fingerprinting) to show you how unique your browser is on the web.
Good food for thought when three-letter agencies talk about "mere metadata."
/.ed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:/.ed? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed! Page isn't loading, that was fast as hell.
For those looking for other resources tho, that DO load
http://samy.pl/evercookie/ [samy.pl]
https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [eff.org]
I'm a special snowflake apparently. (Score:1)
"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 4,789,097 tested so far.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 22.19 bits of identifying information."
Re:I'm a special snowflake apparently. (Score:5, Informative)
Fonts seems to be what does it. With many programs coming with extra/special fonts, it quickly narrows the users down based on what they have installed.
Of course, for fonts that only come as part of a software package but install fonts as system fonts (why?), it also tells remote sites what you have installed, which is an additional privacy concern.
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Re:I'm a special snowflake apparently. (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about? Browsers don't send installed fonts list to anybody!
The detection occurs when in CSS you specify font-family: XYZ. This is going to be displayed in the default font, unless the font XYZ is installed. By analyzing the width of the element you specified the font for (or drawing it into a canvas element) you can distinguish the cases where the font is installed from the case where the default font is used instead.
Hard to circumvent...
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Hard to circumvent...
NoScript takes care of most signature methods including tests for installed fonts.
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NoScript will be disabled on the websites you want to do something with. Those will be able to track you.
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I, for one, find it nice that I can use all the very nice fonts available on ALL iOS devices without a 100kB payload to my users. Specially for mobile devices where 100kB payload can take quite a while, depending on the network conditions.
Other platforms will default to other fonts, chosen by me as well.
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Who cares? Whatever your default font is, it doesn't have the same widths of most other fonts, so they can be extracted.
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I know, but you don't need flash (or Java for that matter) to detect fonts in a browser. And the browser doesn't "send" a list of fonts, you have to have dynamic code to list the fonts on the client side.
Re:I'm a special snowflake apparently. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is not in fonts (on non-embedded there's no such thing as too many good fonts!), but in letting a random webpage poke that deeply into your system.
The message "No Flash or Java fonts detected" suggests who the culprits are. Flash belongs behind FlashBlock, Java belongs in /dev/null.
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> Flash belongs behind FlashBlock, Java belongs in /dev/null ...and Javascript belongs in /dev/null too. Any active content can (and does) turn against you and is a trojan from the ads industry.
Re:I'm a special snowflake apparently. (Score:5, Informative)
This page [pieroxy.net] will detect the fonts on your system without Java or Flash.
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It did find only 60 out of 221 fonts installed on my system, but that's still good enough for some serious fingerprinting.
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With noScript enabled, it show no fonts at all.
None of the buttons work, either.
Dunno what you're talking about.
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Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 22.19 bits of identifying information."
In my case, it was the browser plugins that uniquely identified me.
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Same here.
But I wonder why my browser needs to provide details about the plugins I have installed to any website I visit. What kind of legitimate use could that have?
Re:I'm a special snowflake apparently. (Score:4, Interesting)
But I wonder why my browser needs to provide details about the plugins I have installed to any website I visit. What kind of legitimate use could that have?
Sites recover the plugin list to see if you support whatever content they want to send you. If you don't have a certain plugin the site can fallback to some other way of displaying the information or it can refuse to do anything. For example, trying Flash to diplay a video then falling back to html5.
Is it useful ?
Somewhat, albeit less and less with html5. Also, there's many plugins sites don't need to know about, as for example a pdf plugin. Some plugins should be totally transparent because they don't interact with the site.
Is it bad for anonymity? Yes, it's terrible.
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Just tried switching that off. I'm still unique, but that brings my uniqueness on the "one in x browsers have this" down from ~15M to well inside 100k
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"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 4,789,097 tested so far.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 22.19 bits of identifying information."
Unique amongst the browser's tested. Is there a selection bias amongst people who would check to see if their browser is unique going on? I tried with IE from a generic install of windows 7 and still get the "you appear to be unique" message.
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iPhone came back with "one in 252,331 have the same fingerprint as yours". I can't think of a more generic browser signature.
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[...] but would it not be smarter to include a list of things to make your browser less unique?
Yes, recommending what to do to improve anonymity is one of our next possible steps, but to do so you need to have data to know what to recommend, hence the site. We're looking into a recommendation system for future work.
P.S. I worked a little bit amiunique.org
Things to make browsers less unique (Score:2)
I already ranted about fonts, but amiunique decided that my browser version (the one supported my the IT department at work) and time zone (UTF-8) and language (en-US) were enough to get uniqueness. Apparently everybody on the West Coast are running newer browsers :-)
Re: /.ed? (Score:3)
Almost certainly not from Slashdot. From their stats, most of their visitors are in France.
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Almost certainly not from Slashdot. From their stats, most of their visitors are in France.
Probably French cabbies [slashdot.org] blocking the interweb tubes...
Totally and completely identifiable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Always have been, and always will, for as long as light echos through space and time. But nobody really cares who I am. They know who I am, nevertheless.
I am the walrus.
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Goo goo g'joob !
Identifiable enough that Google targets ads (Score:4, Interesting)
Google serves my computer ads for mens watches, it serves my wifes computer, on the same NAT, (the same PC, same screen resolution) ads for shoes. Both have cookies blocked and flash is disabled by default. Mine also blocks lots of google sites, yet I have yet to find a way to block doubleclick. Our browsers are both set to tell sites to "do no track". Neither of us uses Google for search these days, switching to Duck Duck Go.
So the fingerprinting is enough for Google to send us personalized adverts.
Now if someone can tell me the full list of domains I need to block to prevent DoubleClick (also from Google) from serving ads, I'd appreciate it.
Re: Identifiable enough that Google targets ads (Score:3)
"Now if someone can tell me the full list of domains I need to block to prevent DoubleClick (also from Google) from serving ads, I'd appreciate it."
I gently suggest that you're doing it wrong. Block everything *except* those sites you actually want to use. The list will be far, far shorter.
For random exceptions, you might use startpage/ix-quick proxies, which filter JavaScript.
A.
Re: Identifiable enough that Google targets ads (Score:5, Informative)
What I do is to identify what sites are serving me ads, surf those sites while capturing packets using your favorite tool (NetworkTrafficView from Nirsoft if using Windows is easy) and block those sites using your firewall (IPs) and/or hosts file (FQDNs). I haven't seen a DoubleClick ad in years. In Windows my hosts file looks like this:
0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.n2434.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 a.doubleclick.net
The Slashdot filter made me cut quite a bit out, but you get the idea.
This work has already been done and gets updated for you here: http://someonewhocares.org/hos... [someonewhocares.org]
My Windows Firewall is more extensive. I block massive subnets in Russia, Ukraine, and China (ex. LACNIC Latin American and Caribbean 190.0.0.0/8). This is all for a laptop that leaves the house. For an in-home solution you should get a better router and block them at the gateway so your iPad is safe too. pfSense is very flexible, but DD-WRT can do some neat tricks.
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"Actually, no. Web surfing involves visiting a multitude of sites."
Sorry, but blacklisting involves blocking a lot *more* sites, and ongoing maintenance to keep that list updated to account for changes that are out of your control. A whitelist needs initial setup, and only requires changes based on your needs.
My browser is whitelisted. I do what I described.
It is not 'painfully difficult', your wife acceptance factor notwithstanding. I (and I expect most people) visit the same sites day after day. I am
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"YOU WOULD HAVE TO WHITELIST TO ACCESS THEM @ ALL (you're talking a practically never ending battle there))."
For the love of Pete, did you not read my original post?
For casual exceptions to the whitelist you use a free filtering proxy. My example was Startpage.com/ix-quick. You don't need to update your whitelist except for sites that you have an ongoing relationship with.
Once again, I *do* this. It's mostly a set-and-forget. And the great thing about it is that if some new tracker/adfarm thing comes al
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Sorry, not chasing your moving goalposts. Use the solution that works for you - I do.
A.
Re:Identifiable enough that Google targets ads (Score:5, Interesting)
Not being funny, but that's hardly tracking unless you are actually after a watch or shoes. I imagine a watch / shoes ad is the kind of thing that a company will push to everyone this near to Christmas.
Also, I once got several months of leotard adverts because I happened to click something in our (school) web logs to check it was okay for pupils to see. There's just a correlation on the ad networks between your IP and something you may have clicked / searched / been on. It doesn't mean they are tracking you, per se. They just realise that you are two separate browsers with two separate signatures. Lots of things can do that, even being a single plugin different. Just being logged into a certain account on one site might push certain ads your way.
Load up Ghostery and visit your normal sites. See how many of them are also serving up ads etc. that can form correlations between your browser and a certain product. Cookies blocked everywhere? I don't believe it, you'd never be able to log into anything. Flash disabled? Well, yes, I have that by default but for security not tracking. "Do not track" is an absolute waste of time. And just because duckduckgo doesn't track you, doesn't mean the sites you land on don't.
Take this "for instance" - your wife went on a shoe shop once. You went on a watch shop once. Both the same IP. But one of you was also logged in elsewhere on a single other site. Bam. You get different ads. Just being a 0.1 version out on your browser will distinguish one from the other. Or having slightly different plugins. Or even just having different source port numbers (as NAT'ing will ensure).
Sorry if you don't realise this, but the amount of effort you're putting into making your life hard and hiding, is actually just making you stand out just the same. How many hours have you wasted trying to block this stuff, and still you're identifiable?
Either start fresh every session with a Privoxy proxy and fake user-agent strings, or don't bother. And even that won't hide you. And even then, you'll never know if the watch advert was for something you clicked years ago, or random spam because they know nothing about you and pick a random product. Hell, do you even know if you haven't each separately cached a random advert?
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>>> "Cookies blocked everywhere? I don't believe it, you'd never be able to log into anything."
Try wiping your cookies on session or window close. You can accept cookies and not keep them longer than necessary.
>>>"Flash disabled? Well, yes, I have that by default but for security not tracking. "Do not track" is an absolute waste of time. And just because duckduckgo doesn't track you, doesn't mean the sites you land on don't."
The sites will track them only if yo
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Seriously, this guy is still doing the rounds?
Come back when the advertisers have all moved onto the same CDN's as everyone else and you can't block by IP.
The rest? Well, apart from the utter bullshit, it's called a DNS proxy.
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Now if someone can tell me the full list of domains I need to block to prevent DoubleClick (also from Google) from serving ads, I'd appreciate it.
I use a HOSTS file, it serves me well; quite large at this time. I also take the time to read a sites TOS they will tell you what to block (though one link says they don't mention Flash Cookies (or one of the three mentioned).
Read the TOS of ROVIO.COM (Angry Birds); "sent overseas" well where?
When I last read it long ago it gave me a lot of sites to block; the most important being Flurry.com.
Angry birds (all of ROVIO.COM programs) collect your information then sells it to Flurry.com (It's Google) who in tur
Re:Identifiable enough that Google targets ads (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently, Ghostery is pretty effective at blocking doubleclick. I do not get those personalized advertisements. The ONLY place where "ads" are even somewhat accurately aimed at me, is Amazon. If/when I clear cookies, and browse without signng in, their limited accuracy disappears.
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MEH (Score:5, Informative)
Second, when I allowed the site in my script blocker, it was slow as hell to load.
But Third, and more to the point: EFF's Panopticlick [eff.org] has been around for a long time now, and it's far better.
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Actually my uniqueness has changed most times that I've visited Panopticon because the information underlying the fingerprint changes regularly, limiting it's usefulness.
Not impressed (Score:2)
Below are the results I got. Really? So I'm the only person who speaks English, running Chrome on Windows 7, in the Central time zone? If that's enough to identify me, then I'm feeling pretty exposed.
Google, on the other hand, can probably tell me my life history, with all the data they have on me.
Yes! (You can be tracked!)
34.59 % of observed browsers are Chrome, as yours.
22.54 % of observed browsers are Chrome 39.0, as yours.
58.71 % of observed browsers run Windows, as yours.
40.04 % of observed browsers
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Well, they claim 1 in 11000, as opposed to 1 in 20000. I question their math. (And yours). You don't get to multiple the liklihood of Chrome and Chrome 39 together, they are highly correlated. See also Windows and Windows 7.
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Your understanding of their last statement is mistaken. The 1 over 11099 has nothing to do with the above statistics. It only says that of the 11099 browser tested, there are only 1 with the union of the above elements. How big a set is, is irrelevant when considering its union with one or multiple other sets.
However, what the statistics do tell you is which of those parameters is more or less common with the ensemble. Eliminating a rarely occurring parameter could move you to a more common set intersection
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Your understanding of their last statement is mistaken. The 1 over 11099 has nothing to do with the above statistics. It only says that of the 11099 browser tested, there are only 1 with the union of the above elements.
You're spot on, that's exactly what it says.
How big a set is, is irrelevant when considering its union with one or multiple other sets.
However, what the statistics do tell you is which of those parameters is more or less common with the ensemble. Eliminating a rarely occurring parameter could move you to a more common set intersection, making you thus less traceable. But deducing the union probability from the set statistics is not trivial, if possible at all without further constraints.
We're looking into putting in a recommendation system to help users improve their anonymity.
But I am wondering if 11099 trials can be considered significant in this case. There are looking at 6 or more parameters which have countless possible values.
It's sufficient for us to do quite a bit of analyses on the data and to possibly implement and provide the recommendation system. The data is however highly skewed towards geeks and towards user's in France (a.k.a french geeks!).
Disclaimer: a couple of colleagues and I created amiunique.org to get some data to understand fingerprinting better. It's a small student project b
Numbers Don't Lie, But -- (Score:5, Insightful)
Their sample size is 11-thousand. According to my results, 1-in-6 computers are running Linux!
This is absurd, unscientific to the extreme, fear-mongering.
In your example, based only on the statistics you provided, there were 11099x0.0109 or 120 people in the central time zone *in their sample*, which is the sample size of UTC-6 users.
Their data is useless.
In comparison, https://panopticlick.eff.org/i... [eff.org] has almost 5-million in their database. This is somewhat more helpful.
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Incorrect, yes.
Fear-mongering? Very definitely NO.
As you point out (and as I pointed out elsewhere), Panopticlick is superior. But it paints a far WORSE picture than this site does.
So, "fear-mongering"? No. False sense of security? Maybe.
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Their sample size is 11-thousand. According to my results, 1-in-6 computers are running Linux!
We had to start somewhere. Mostly geeks go to the site anyway, so the data is skewed towards them.
It started as a small project to understand fingerprinting.So far it's been quite successful for our research purposes :)
This is absurd, unscientific to the extreme, fear-mongering.
It's just a site that collects stats and then shows them. It also implements other fingerprinting techniques that other sites do not. How is this unscientific or fear mongering?
In your example, based only on the statistics you provided, there were 11099x0.0109 or 120 people in the central time zone *in their sample*, which is the sample size of UTC-6 users.
Their data is useless.
In comparison, https://panopticlick.eff.org/i... [eff.org] has almost 5-million in their database. This is somewhat more helpful.
As said before, we needed to start somewhere, right? It seems people have taken unexpected interest in the site. We'
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The only thing I found interesting was this:
Use of AdBlock 49.28%
But that probably says more about the people who would visit the site than it does of AdBlock users.
Especially with the sample size so small at is is. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [eff.org] has a much much higher sample base.
Other things that could be checked but which aren't include whether the browser allows SSL2, SSL3, TLS1.0, TLS1.1, and what kind of encryption.
Also, the ballpark speed at which it evaluates Javascript.
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Pray tell us how to use hosts files through a proxy server.
It's the proxy server that looks up the host names, not your local resolver.
Also, how well does it work with wildcards? There are ad companies that use thousands of random hosts, of the form 47db.adcompany.com, 1a74.adcompany.com, 357f.adcompany.com. With a hosts file, you have to fill out every single possible entry ahead of time, because it doesn't take a wildcard like *.adcompany.com.
Nor does it block IP addresses. How would you use a hosts f
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The answer is NO to all of the above, because I have to go through a proxy.
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Please explain how hosts entries would block:
- Any host on the 123.64.0.0/11 network. .2o7.net regardless of hostname[*].
- Any host that ends with
- Requests that embed a hostname or IP address in the URL
[*]: You are aware that some trackers use pseudo-random hostnames that are resolved through wildcard DNS entries, right? That way they can track exactly where you came from too, because the hostname will be unique for just you.
All you have to do is give examples that do the above. It's you who claim hos
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No, Privoxy won't help if you have to go through an external proxy. You know, one that you don't have control over, but where work can log who visited what pages. Work, like what you don't have because you're a kook and unemployable.
With a remote proxy, no local resolving takes place at all (other than the address of the proxy server). No matter what hosts tables you have set up on your local machine doesn't matter because the resolving doesn't happen on your machine at all.
Adblock works great, because
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I'm unique as well, however the it gave a list of what items I was unique in Namely the only thing that I did not share with the vast majority of others was the exact nature of my plugin list. The exact version and names of all enabled plugins apparently had a unique configuration..Personally I don't see a need to broadcast my plugin list is there anyway to prevent it?
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Was that good design? Probably not. But it was well-intended.
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The interne cables are tapped... (Score:3)
... of course they know who you are. You need an IP to send and receive information, just the nature of making a connection leaves a trail all by itself. Next it's not that hard to develop mathematical techniques to analyze text and language in posts since they can analyze that most people have limited memory and interest by nature of them being finite beings and can simply build profiles by simply combining all the little tiny bits of different info into some unique ID if they wanted to.
The nature of our technology has augmented our ability to see and detect so much it's increasingly difficult to hide anymore. I shudder to think how small cameras are becoming and how they will be all pervasive where it matters. We're basically moving into a "tripwire" society where hidden and not so hidden automated track wherever you go what you do and all that data can be stored, analyzed, etc.
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Budget projects much? "Doable" and "easy" are not the same words. I'm guessing one person out of a hundred in the general population could take a reasonable stab at developing such an algorithm, and only one person out of a thousand could be considered a natural talent.
The first 20% of the work gets you to sqrt(sqrt(7e9)) as your mean perplexity, which is simultaneously impressive and yet not terribly actio
Fonts make you very identifiable (Score:5, Interesting)
Standard Mozilla behaviour last time this question came up is to include a list of fonts that your browser can display; I don't know whether other browsers do the same, or if they've changed it, but it's the kind of "feature" that hopelessly breaks your chances of non-uniqueness if you've ever installed fonts.
My work laptop has a font that's the Official Corporate-Branded font for $DAYJOB's corporate logo. Almost every Windows machine at my company has that (at least, every physical machine and the virtual machines running on the hosted virtual desktop cloud; there may be some lab machines that don't, and maybe some contractors, etc.) You might work for a smaller company that does the same. In my case, I've installed all sorts of other random fonts, either to see what they looked like, or simply because back in the 80s of course you wanted Elvish and Dwarvish fonts on your computer, or because I wanted a better monospaced programming font than the default MS one or Courier New.
Lots of other things leak information as well (cookies, etc.), but fonts are a quick and dirty way around identifying people who block those.
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It really doesn't matter to anyone except people who block cookies (and that's not you, because you're logged in). Those people are so rare, I don't think anyone's using any alternate method to track people. Cookies work well enough for tracking.
Actually there are commercial fingerprinting services. The Cookieless Monster [ieee-security.org] does a good job at analyzing them. Many sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook and others mention the colleciton of "device information" in their privacy policies too.
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Make a script that pseudorandomly removes and replaces obscure fonts if you're that concerned.
Re:Fonts make you very identifiable (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that it would be simpler for Firefox (and other browsers) to just whitelist a default set of fonts and those are the only ones it uses regardless of what might be installed on the system on any site you are trying to limit tracking. (It can allow for web embedded fonts; it just won't load anything but the default set from the system.)
If MS wanted to do it for IE, they'd just have the non-default font set blocked for the "Internet Zone" and allowed for the "Trusted Zone" which should cover most intranet scenarios where they've got custom fonts.
I suppose an "exceptions" list could be managed separately as well if was really necessary; or it could be tied to the cookie exceptions list -- which would be logical from a "privacy reasoning" perspective... but counter-intuitive from the "why are local fonts not loading for this site just because i blocked cookies" perspective.
In any case the upshot is that any given version of any given browser on any given platform will have the same fonts available as any other instance of that version of that browser on that platform -- then "font profiling" adds nothing to the basic platform information they already had.
Mod Parent Up Please (Score:2)
Yup, that's the right thing to do.
I don't know that being 1 of 11,776 is "unique" (Score:2)
According to that site "[I] Can Be Tracked!" because my fingerprint is the same as 11,775 others. That number seems to be generated only by people visiting the site meaning the pool would most likely be larger.
Obviously Browser Fingerprinting is a real thing, but that site seems to be geared toward hyperbole than actually educating.
Why don't browsers clean it up? (Score:5, Interesting)
GIven most of the data is what's reported by a browser, why don't browsers filter the data?
Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?
Fonts - Microsoft released 6 fonts for the web over a decade ago - just report those 6 across all platforms and maybe a few standard system ones (you can get this from the User-Agent anyways). Make it whitelist of fonts.
Sure, some data is gathered through plugins, but I thought many are now click-to-run so you can't get that data unless you specifically run those plugins.
Is there a reason why browsers like Firefox return everything?
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Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?
You have misunderstood what "Do Not Track" means.
It turns on a flag always telling remote websites "this user does not want to be tracked". It has nothing to do with telling your browser to change its behavior, it gives remote sites a piece of information about your wishes.
Whoever came up with the idea was a dumb shit, and whoever let it become implemented as a browser option was even dumber - it was blindingly obvious from the star that in real life, it's just sending the remote site one more bit of infor
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Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?
You have misunderstood what "Do Not Track" means.
No, I don't think he did. He was suggesting that browsers truly act on that option selection in a useful way. You misunderstood his post.
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No, I don't think he did. He was suggesting that browsers truly act on that option selection in a useful way. You misunderstood his post.
The Do Not Track option is defined in the RFC draft [ietf.org] as not doing anything except sending the DNT: 1 header to a remote server. Having it do more goes against the specification.
Of course, browsers can implement other functionality to thwart tracking, but not as part of Do Not Track, which has a very specific meaning.
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GIven most of the data is what's reported by a browser, why don't browsers filter the data?
Google won't do it in Chrome because they want to track you. They threatened to not respect the 'Do Not Track' flag if any browser enabled it by default.
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Is there a reason why browsers like Firefox return everything?
"All the better to track you with, my dear..." -- the NSA
(... aka The Big Bad Wolf. And do you really think your house of bricks is that opaque?)
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Most of it isn't "reported" by the browser.
Most of it is fed to your browser and then your browser regurgitates it as it's expected to.
If I modify a web server to send only you a random numbered URL, and then watch for that random-numbered URL, I've formed a correlation between your IP and your browser session. If I can get that to tie in with other sites, or give me the slightest hint about those, I can correlate the information.
If I get your browser to go to a random link, and you have history settings t
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Wrong question - What does he have to share?
Mere metadata (Score:2)
uh oh (Score:2)
Hello, I'm snotnose (Score:2)
Dang, I should change the latter. Some of the petitions I sign could be embarrassing.
That said, I assume the original article meant something more subtle. I wouldn't know, the link is dead to me.
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It's not the excessive tracking you should be afraid of. What you should worry about is the usage of incomplete data.
As has been covered on slashdot before [slashdot.org] NSA kills people based on metadata [nybooks.com]
Now add that together with some accidental killing of a person with the same name [theguardian.com]
A Reprieve team investigating on the ground in Pakistan turned up what it believes to be a confirmed case of mistaken identity. Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administration’s “kill list” was killed on the third attempt by US drones.
What this tells me is that what I really should worry about is to accidentally having metadata that correlates with someone that the government wants dead.
I admit it: I'm a car and a database (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBase
Apple is more anonymous (Score:1)
I just tried https://panopticlick.eff.org on my iPad and Windows PCs. The Windows PC was uniquely identifiable with Firefox or IE but the iPad came out as 1 in 24 million. Looks like there is an advantage to Apple's locked down standardised platform.
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But since your iPad is freely accepting cookies and blocking no ads or anything else, you're just as trackable by traditional methods. Damned if you do...
One thing I noticed (Score:1)
Yes, like many, my result was "Unique". I noticed that one item being measured was browser resolution. Since I was running my browser at less than full screen and the exact window size is a low entropy parameter, I decided to try again after maximizing my browser window. As expected, the result was a lower uniqueness score. That led me to wonder if some technique like modifying the exact size of the browser window by a few pixels each time it's refreshed might help somewhat to hide from these evil trackers.
9% of browsers using NoScript (Score:1)
... or something equivalent like disabled scripting.
It does give usefull feedback at least. :)
Currently impossible to stop (Score:3)
As others have noted, the EFF Panopticlick [eff.org] is the better service.
I just spent far too much time playing around with this, on an extended lunch break. I note the following things:
- You had better disable explicit tracking services (Ghostery), or it all doesn't matter anyway.
- Fonts are a big factor. Fonts are identified through Flash. There is a configuration file "mms.cfg" that can disable this. The location of this file depends on your operating system and on your browser - it took me a good half-hour to find it for my particular configuration.
- However, even after disabling fonts, and even using a "user-agent switcher" to look like a Windows/Chrome combination (instead of Linux/Chrome), I was still uniquely identifiable. The biggest factor were my language preferences, the list of plugins, and the precise browser version. Refusing to report system fonts was also pretty important :-/
In short, there's not much way around it - if you include other information available, like your IP address, you will be uniquely identifiable, and trackable across websites.
What is missing from this picture: Browsers provide an "incognito" mode. This mode needs to be extended to provide only absolutely essential information to the server. The server needs to know roughly what level of standards support you have (e.g., "Mozilla/5.0"), and what language to send content in (one language, not a list with weights). Everything else could be omitted, and virtually all websites would work perfectly.
Go a step farther and disable JavaScript in incognito mode, to prevent explicit sniffing. That will disable more websites, but if those sites start losing traffic, they'll offer versions that don't require JS.
My mother will be so disappointed. (Score:2)
Meh (Score:2)
First, the flippant comment:
I find it astonishing that in this day and age when apparently they can track everything I do, want, and own online without my permission, my ATM still asks me WHAT LANGUAGE I want to use? Seriously? After I've answered that once, it's done. I'm not changing my native language guys. Offering it subsequently is doing a favor only for the foreign-language dude that steals my card.
Second, the serious one:
a) the site itself is fairly vague and misleading:
"Yes! (You can be tracked
Re: (Score:2)
... that has used their website so far. They've only got 24000ish data points; I can well believe that at this stage, small correlations result in apparently weird results. Give them a few million samples and I bet that those factors won't make you unique anymore.
This is cool (Score:2)
But,
Are you unique?
Yes! (You can be tracked!)
47.07 % of observed browsers are Firefox, as yours.
3.74 % of observed browsers are Firefox 31.0, as yours.
19.73 % of observed browsers run Linux, as yours.
62.02 % of observed browsers have set "en"as their primary language, as yours.
15.47 % of observed browsers have UTC-5 as their timezone, as yours.
You have the only browser out of 26601 with this fingerprint.
Okay. Now what? Also 26601 "browsers" doesn't sound like a lot when you're talking about potential billio
I am legion (Score:2)
Of course I am unique from their sample, I used an unreleased test version of a browser - I had to be unique. However, that version of tracking is useless as I have
Does that mean I am, what, 40 different people according to them?
Honeypot (Score:2)
See Comment Subject.
Says I Can be Tracked (Score:2)
But most of my "uniqueness" seems to be about the fact that I'm a Mac user, using Safari. They also extracted a lot of fonts. What I wonder is, how useful is this information if I'm blocking ads and trackers, tossing cookies regularly, and using a VPN? To whom would it be useful?
(I'm not being rhetorical)