What your browser discloses about your machine....

j_xavier · May 18, 2010, 9:12pm

Interesting analysis by the EFF about browser fingerprints here:

Is Every Browser Unique? Results Fom The Panopticlick Experiment | Electronic Frontier Foundation

and a corresponding test for your browser here:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

there is also a pdf of the whole report on the EFF page for those interested. Surprising what an adept jscript guy can wring from your machine.

DenverD · May 19, 2010, 7:07am

j xavier wrote:
> https://panopticlick.eff.org/

THANKS for that pointer…the check above deemed my firefox, opera,
lynx, links and IE6 (as provided by IEs4Linux) all returned “appears
to be unique” among ~953k tested…

however my Konqueror never moved off of “please wait” which i think is
a GOOD-thing!

oldcpu · May 19, 2010, 7:43am

I suspect if you try again it will work, and that may have been a slight glitch on the side of the site. It gives a return with my Konqueror.

DenverD · May 19, 2010, 10:17am

oldcpu wrote:
> I suspect if you try again it will work, and that may have been a slight
> glitch on the side of the site. It gives a return with my Konqueror.

hmmm…mine stayed “please wait” for over 15 minutes the first time i
tried it…i’ll leave it a while longer…

two hours and 27 minutes later i happen upon the pane with Konqueror
still in “please wait”…

no doubt, it could be a fault in my old KDE3 Konqueror…

an0dos · May 19, 2010, 3:19pm

I have a fairly fresh install of openSUSE / firefox. The only significant changes I made was installing no-script.

They estimated that my browser contains 16.44 bits of identifying information with most of it being contained in my browser’s user agent. (this translates to approximately 1 in 88,000 browsers being identical to mine).

I then installed the firefox “user-agent switcher” add-on and switched my user agent to IE6. When I returned to the site, it estimated that my browser contains 11.37 bits of identifying information. (this translates to approximately 1 in 2650 browsers being identical to mine).

I think this shows the following:

The identification is heavily dependent on the browser’s user agent (which is easily changed).
It has a hard time distinguishing between default installs.

My conclusion is that it is not a very effective way of identifying a person.I also wonder how they can account for people who use different browsers depending on the situation. Thoughts?

Edit: I realized that no-script was probably killing my test results thus making me bland and un-unique. This goes to show that you shouldn’t test things right after waking up and before drinking coffee.

ken_yap · May 19, 2010, 3:35pm

The point is that the rarer the combinations found on your machine, the less likely that somebody else would have that combination by chance. So for less identifiability, you should:

Run the most common OS, ugh you know which one
Run a common browser, which means IE or FF
Don’t install any but the most common plugins
Don’t have any rare fonts or strange screen sizes

So to be less identifiable, you have to be more bland. Sorry, that sounds like a horrible fate. I’d rather stand out from the crowd and have my machine the way I like it.

an0dos · May 19, 2010, 7:20pm

As I mentioned earlier, I have a fairly default install of opensuse on my computer; however, once I enabled javascript for the test site, my computer registered as unique.

I think a more appropriate conclusion is that if you want to be anonymous, use no-script and TOR.

j_xavier · May 19, 2010, 7:59pm

the policy of “get all the information you can” is so rampant on the internet that it should scare anybody that has more than two brain cells.

reminds me of the carrot and donkey scenario.

Lord_Emsworth · May 19, 2010, 9:56pm

It would be really fun if there was a widely used browser add-on that sends random bogus user-agent info, such as “If you can read this, you are ***]”, Watcha lookin’ at, ***]", “We are watching YOU” etc., instead of “Mozilla/5.0 blah blah”

an0dos · May 19, 2010, 11:58pm

You mean like this?

I might have to keep this as my default user agent now.

Lord_Emsworth · May 20, 2010, 3:42am

lol! Yeah, only with millions and billions of browsers …