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Beta Version of Nevercookie Released
wiredmikey writes "Anonymizer has released a beta version of Nevercookie, the recently announced Firefox plugin designed to protect against the Evercookie, a JavaScript API built and made available to prove that the more you store and the more places you store it, the harder it is for users to control a Web site's ability to uniquely identify their computer. Evercookie is a more persistent form of cookie that enables the storage of cookie data in a number of different locations, such as Flash cookies and various locations of HTML5 storage. This allows websites to track user behavior even when users have enabled private browsing. Because an Evercookie stores data in locations outside of where standard cookies are stored, an Evercookie can rebuild itself unless users go through a number of steps to completely clear and reset their local storage."
Yeah, for the full privacy package you should combine this extension with an anonymizing proxy that you trust. As far as the panopticlick browser fingerprinting issue, I hope to integrate browser fingerprint manipulation into later versions of Nevercookie. This project is my 20 at work, we get 20% of our time for side projects. And yes, I expect Samy to counter with additional features to Evercookie, I'd be sad if he didn't :P.
It's worth remembering that everything a corporation tracks and stores is subject to subpoena or outright theft by the US Government. Tracking isn't ephemeral. There are increasingly large "profiles" of you being stored in databases of some very large corporations and if you really believe that those are safe and secure from prying eyes, whether it's employees of those companies, insurance companies that want nothing more than can charge you more or drop your policy, or government agencies who are convinced you're a threat to national security, you're sadly mistaken.
They can fingerprint you based on your OS, system fonts, plug-ins, IP address, screen resolution and other exposed hardware capabilities, time zone, etc. Then they can surveil you as you move around the Web and increase the strength of that fingerprint based on the sites you visit that are in their "network" (think about how many properties Google owns from search to gmail to docs to youtube to blogger but then remember also that they can see you at non-googel sites because of adsense and google analytics and youtube embeds and feedburner and sites with re-captcha or google checkout or maps mash-ups or google's site-specific searches.
You are not anonymous, even if you rebuild your VM every day. You'd have to randomize all the features of your OS and your browser and then you'd have to reboot between pretty much every website you visit.