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De-Anonymizing Social Network Users
An anonymous reader writes "The H has an article about some researchers who found a new way to de-anonymize people. Compared to the EFF's Panopticlick, the goal of this experiment is not to identify a user's browser uniquely, but to identify individual users. The test essentially exploits the fact that many social network users are identifiable by their membership of various groups. According to the researchers, it's very unlikelly that two people on any social network will belong to exactly the same groups. A 'group fingerprint' can thus allow websites to identify previously anonymous visitors. They describe the setup and all details and the results look very interesting. They also have a live demo for the social network Xing that was able to de-anonymize me."
Your font list is reported by flash and java. Your browser is innocent of this. Disabling flash & java goes long way to make your system information less accessible.
Sniffing history is basic feature of xhtml/css, price you pay for selectors. a:visited (background-image:"slashdotorg.png") && boo! - if you go to my site, you will request specific image and i can see it in logs, boom, i know you were to slashdot.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Xing is a German site similar to LinkedIn. It's quite popular in Europe. Nothing to do with BSD, GNU or anything else along those lines.