San Francisco – New research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found that an overwhelming majority of web browsers have unique signatures — creating identifiable “fingerprints†that could be used to track you as you surf the Internet.
The findings were the result of an experiment EFF conducted with volunteers who visited
http://panopticlick.eff.org/. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant’s operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins — information that websites routinely access each time you visit — and compared that information to a database of configurations collected from almost a million other visitors. EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser “fingerprints.†Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.
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