[Infowarrior] - Panopticlick: Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking

[Richard Forno]

Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking Announcement
by Peter Eckersley
What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web?

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 is running an experiment to find out. Our new 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.

To join the experiment:
http://panopticlick.eff.org/