VID See the Fingerprints Your Browser Leaves when you're Surfing the Web & How Easily ID'd you are

Find out What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web and see how easily identifiable you are

Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer's configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?

EFF (Electronic frontier Foundation) is running an experiment to find out. Website Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system, your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of five million other configurations. Then, it will give you a uniqueness score — letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web. Adding your information to our database will help EFF evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, who are already using techniques of this sort to record people's online activities. They develop these methods in secret, and don't always tell the world what they've found. But this experiment will give us more insight into the privacy risk posed by browser fingerprinting, and help web users to protect themselves.

Wow!! this is a very in depth article with LOADS of information of how easily traceable you are. This article is packed with information that the average laymen is unaware of. I am pretty computer savvy and there were things in this article that I was taken back by.

I realize that we're only supposed to include a snippet of the original article but I wanted to add the Videos from the article in the OP as it puts this into perspective and encourages the reading of the full article IMO. I highly recommend you take the time to fully read the article as it is quite informative and should put your privacy online (or lack thereof) into a great deal of perspective.








Thoughts?


EDIT: Edited and paraphrased the title of the original article in order to stay within the 100 character max for thread titles. The link in the OP is the original title of the article.

[edit on 5/5/2010 by UberL33t]

no offense bro
but all those videos will take
over 3 hrs to watch.

I understand the importance here
but maybe a summary would have been
better in this case.

reply to post by boondock-saint


I realize, and I know it will be a time consuming venture to take in all the information.

To summarize, in a Nutshell, Big Brother IS watching you, but most of us here already knew that. This just puts it into detailed specifics on just how they're able to do so. As far as all the videos accompanying the article, I just posted them in the thread for convenience as some people are more apt to watch a video as opposed to reading an article.

Okay here is my results from Panopticlick

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 824,842 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 19.65 bits of identifying information.

This test gives you detailed results so I am presuming that since my browser is unique I am somewhat easily identifiable. Now to try and deem what and where those 19.65 bits of information are from these results.

It says that they are collecting this information anonymously, but I can't help but wonder if this is a clever ploy by TPTB to create a sort of Computer DNA style database. Oh well, I have nothing to hide.

Any one else brave enough to test their fingerprint and post their result?

After taking a closer look at these results, it appears that most of the identifiable info on your browser comes from your Browser Plug-Ins as well as your System Fonts. This makes perfect sense as I have downloaded certain plug-ins for Firefox that are limited to my personal preference, as well I have downloaded specific fonts that I use.

So it would seem that to be less identifiable one would need to keep all settings on default, both in your OS and your Browser. I for one prefer being unique. On second thought I don't think I'll change anything. Like I said, I have nothing to hide.

Nothing new.

Webservers keep logs of visitors.
Websites can query your browser for alot of information.
A site with Google Analytics can see

Your browser type with capabilities java or flash
Your network
service provider
connection speed
geographic location
language
time on site
pageviews
operating systems
screen colors
screen resolutions
keywords used to visit site
reffering site
tracking your visit on the site from entrance to exit

Alot of info.
However nothing new. If you wanna be safe you need to anonimize your browsing.

I guy, pretending to be a former IT tech from NASA as made some pretty wild claims on ATS (as Astroengineer) and on his blog.

I'm still skeptic about his claims but he has posted on his blog a very interresting and complete guide to anonymity on the web. His guide explains a way to browse the web without leaving any traces with only a modest investment.

Guide to Anonymous & Evidenceless Internet

My computer knowledge are those of a curious user since the 80's but I am in no way a pro. His guide seems thorough and legit.

Any opinions from pros or experienced IT tech would be appreciated.

reply to post by grey580


I agree that the information in the article is nothing new to those in the field. However, I think it's safe to say that this article was generated for the demographic of people who are not familiar with the techniques that are utilized to obtain said information.

From the information in your post you are seemingly knowledgeable in the field. The majority however are not aware of this knowledge and therefore may benefit from the article. Albeit still rather technical, I feel the article is composed so that the average computer user will have a better understanding of how their informational fingerprint is obtained.

Thank you for the additional information none the less.

All of this information gathering would be a good thing if they were using it to find hackers, spammers, website hijackers, computer hijackers etc. But they're not, there using it to try to find supposed terrorists.

I go at life now with this...


Everything is being watched. EVERYTHING. Everything is being heard. EVERYTHING.

The TeleScreen's are everywhere now. EVERYWHERE.

When and if the time comes, and you are deemed a threat to National Security...

YOUR INFORMATION IS ACCESSED AND WENT THROUGH BY A TEAM OF GOVT AGENTS

The Net is the BIGGEST Big Brother device on the planet though.

(Your thoughts, your likes/dislikes, sexual interests, sexual perversions, interests, intellect levels, morals, just about everything about you can be found out in under 2 minutes by TPTB if they need to.)

The Net is just another tool in the system of USACORP...

reply to post by Goethe

(Your thoughts, your likes/dislikes, sexual interests, sexual perversions, interests, intellect levels, morals, just about everything about you can be found out in under 2 minutes by TPTB if they need to.)

It makes one wonder why they need the US Census Bureau anymore. You can get more information from a FB page than what is on the Census form lol. Figuratively speaking of course, but not too far from literal.

reply to post by UberL33t


Well, I clicked the link and ran the test....it said this: Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 824,906 tested so far. User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100403 Fedora/3.6.3-4.fc13 Firefox/3.6.3
HTTP_ACCEPT Headers text/html, */* ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 gzip,deflate en-us,en;q=0.5.

Here is a better test: privacy.net...

Results returned from whois.arin.net:
OrgName: Road Runner HoldCo LLC
OrgID: RRMA
Address: 13241 Woodland Park Road
City: Herndon
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20171
Country: US

Firewall Test

The following ports were checked: 16771, 80
Out of the above ports, the following are open and permitting outbound traffic: 16771,80

Firewall status: PRESENT

I am nowhere near Herndon, Virginia, and the test cannot tell where my actual IP is located at, or anything about my computer. I dare a few of you Microsoft/IE users to run this test, you will be surprised at with online sites know about you.

For the record, I run Fedora 13 KDE Linux, ITables Firewall with full IP masquerade, Firefox 3.6 with Tor, and NoScript.

Does anyone else see the irony in this? Yeah were here to fight for internet privacy so come register with us and let us identify how your PC can be tracked and and IDed on the internet...?

reply to post by hawkiye


They do claim it's anonymous, but like I said before this would be an ideal way for them to create a Computer DNA data-base. Almost 900,000 people have potentially been data-based already. I'm one of them, and like I also mentioned, I fear not because I have nothing to hide. Maybe they'll feel sorry for me and make me the next PowerBall winner

reply to post by autowrench


That is where your ip is located. With your service provider.
but if you had access to the isp client data you can put 2 and 2 together to find out which customer has what ip at what time.

reply to post by UberL33t


Here is what Panopticlick says about me:Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 825,026 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 19.65 bits of identifying information.

Isn't that about the same info that you received?

Yup.
19.65

Try it with I.E and actually get a lower 18.65

1 bit less.

Agree firefox portable w/tor is about as secure as you can get.

Put the bundle on a flash drive, take it anywhere, use it on any computer, leave no tracks and no info as to where you are.

But.

There are limits to paranoia.

reply to post by Violater1

Isn't that about the same info that you received?

Indeed it is, I'd like to see a few more members results. the 18.65 from IE that gotrox posted is the first IE result I've seen. I think we can better make a determination on just how unique our individual fingerprint actually is with a few more results.

Three occurrences of 19.65 would be quite a coincidence, but I'm going to hold out for a few more results to be posted before I jump to any conclusions.

[edit on 5/5/2010 by UberL33t]

Originally posted by grandnic
I guy, pretending to be a former IT tech from NASA as made some pretty wild claims on ATS (as Astroengineer) and on his blog.

I'm still skeptic about his claims but he has posted on his blog a very interresting and complete guide to anonymity on the web. His guide explains a way to browse the web without leaving any traces with only a modest investment.

Guide to Anonymous & Evidenceless Internet

My computer knowledge are those of a curious user since the 80's but I am in no way a pro. His guide seems thorough and legit.

Any opinions from pros or experienced IT tech would be appreciated.

I couldn't evaluate his Mars claims, but he definately knows his computer stuff. I am now usiong the JonDonym software and browser he recommended and its great! I bought the faster access like he said with an anonymous credit card I got at the grocery store. I don't use the anonymity all the time, just when I do research or access sites like Above Top Secret, where I might read or say things I don't want TPTB to know about. The Jondonym browser is great because it disables all the plugins and sciprts and cookies and lets you then turn on cookies and scripts per site to be very safe.

And its cool that you can combine different anonymity products like he says he does for more protection, I didn't realize they would be compatible. I haven't done it yet but I might try the VPN option for when I'm at a place with free wi-fi. I'm always worried about that. astroengineer.wordpress.com...

His advice seems solid to me. I tested my set up on some of the anonymous testing sitesd for all the identifiable leakage through IP, plugins, etc. and everything came back clean.

Paul

reply to post by paulism


I personally am not worried who sees where I go on the net or what I'm viewing. If TPTB should deem that the sites that I visit on the Interwebz needs to be monitored then they have extremely too much free time.