Wednesday, May 5, 2010

How unique is your browser's fingerprint?

It was back in January that we first blogged about the fingerprint that your browser leaves on every website it touches, but Choose Privacy Week seems like an appropriate time to find out how unique YOUR browser is, with the Panopticlick tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The more unique your browser is, the more identifiable you are, even if your IP address changes and don't log into anything.

The browser fingerprint is made up of characteristics that a server can detect, like which browser (and version) you are using, which fonts you have, what plugins are installed, your screen size, and time zone.

This information is legitimately used by webservers to make sure the version of the web page they are showing will work on your system. But, unintentionally, this fingerprint may be provide a unique identifier.

So, try EFF's tool and see how unique your browser is: http://panopticlick.eff.org

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