How Unique Is Your Web Browser? (You're being tracked based on how unique your browser settings are)

Electronic Frontier Foundation ^

[LibWhacker]

Abstract. We investigate the degree to which modern web browsers are subject to "device fingerprinting" via the version and con figurtion information that they will transmit to websites upon request. We implemented one possible fingerprinting algorithm, and collected these fingerprints from a large sample of browsers that visited our test site, panopticlick.eff.org. We observe that the distribution of our fingerprint contains at least 18.1 bits of entropy, meaning that if we pick a browser at random, at best we expect that only one in 286,777 other browsers will share its fingerprint. Among browsers that support Flash or Java, the situation is worse, with the average browser carrying at least 18.8 bits of identifying information. 94.2% of browsers with Flash or Java were unique in our sample.

By observing returning visitors, we estimate how rapidly browser fi ngerprints might change over time. In our sample, fingerprints changed quite rapidly, but even a simple heuristic was usually able to guess when a figerprint was an "upgraded" version of a previously observed browser's fingerprint, with 99.1% of guesses correct and a false positive rate of only 0.86%.

We discuss what privacy threat browser fingerprinting poses in practice, and what countermeasures may be appropriate to prevent it. There is a trade off between protection against fingerprintability and certain kinds of debuggability, which in current browsers is weighted heavily against privacy. Paradoxically, anti- fingerprinting privacy technologies can be self- defeating if they are not used by a sufficient number of people; we show that some privacy measures currently fall victim to this paradox, but others do not.

[Sir_Ed]

WOW! Uniquely identifiable as the only one out of 1.6 million tested!

I have plugins for my Wacom tablet, for Silverlight, Flash, and a bunch of nice fonts I’ve got installed.

Quite an eye-opener!

Ed

[ShadowAce]

Sorry for the delay on this one--I was busy this weekend :)

[ShadowAce]

Interesting.

I originally ran the test with my NoScript turned on, and it returned a 1 in ~600,000. When I turned it off, I was 1 in 1.6M.

[Tribune7]

There is no privacy on the web.

[stylin_geek]

1,610,258

I suspect the number tends to reflect your lack of interest in being a follower.

You have to admit, being unique among 1.5 million sampled is pretty cool.

[GOPJ]

Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 57,512 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.Great, just great...

[GOPJ]

...first learned about tracking unique browser fingerprints while reading a liberal website. They were all in a frenzy over it. Libs always make fun of how dumb Republicans are. But Freepers should take heart; I read all the libs’ comments and Freepers are head and shoulders ahead of them in understanding the problem.

Would've been my first guess...

[publana]

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 1,611,607 tested so far.