Slashdot Mirror
EFF Publishes Study On Browser Fingerprinting
Rubinstien writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation investigated the degree to which modern web browsers are susceptible to 'device fingerprinting' via version and configuration information transmitted to websites. They implemented one possible algorithm, and collected data from a large sample of browsers visiting their Panopticlick test site, which we've discussed in the past. According to the PDF describing the study, browsers that supported Flash or Java on average supplied at least 18.8 bits of identifying information, and 94.2% of those browsers were uniquely identifiable in their sample. My own browser was uniquely identifiable from both the list of plugins and available fonts, among 1,557,962 browsers tested so far."
Er, actually each bit of information doubles (not halves) your uniqueness.
Read the relevant section. They tested the algorithm against browsers that had cookie indication of sameness.
"We ran our algorithm over the set of users whose cookies indicated that they were returning to the site 1{2 hours or more after their first visit, and who now had a different fingerprint."
Take that out and you get a flood of false positives.
You think that's bad. The article is a dupe too.
Worse still it's not a dupe of say an Android article where searching for Android produces pages and pages of results. If you search in slashdot "browser uniqueness" you'll get 3 results, 2 of which almost have the same title.
I still think Slashdot would do just fine without editors.
Halving the possibilities doubles the uniqueness.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.