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Your Web browser's fingerprints can betray you, study finds
Test reveals that unique browser configurations can allow tracking without the use of cookies, By Kevin McCaney. Government Computer News, May 18, 2010. "Browsers have fingerprints, too, which means that Web sites could be able to identify and track visitors even without the use of cookies or super cookies, according to a recent study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation..."
Further information on Your Web browser's fingerprints can betray you, study finds
Last updated: 19 May 20101
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- How Unique Is Your Web Browser? - in pdf format (429kb)
- (This document requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader). by Peter Eckersley? Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 2010. "Abstract. We investigate the degree to which modern web browsers are subject to "device fingerprinting" via the version and configuration 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 side, 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..."
Added: 19 May 2010
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