A New Use For Browser Fingerprints: Defeating Spoofing (browserprint.info)

AnonymousCube writes: Researchers at the University of Adelaide have found a new use for browser fingerprints: uncovering and defeating spoofing by web browsers. By using machine learning on browser fingerprints they were able to correctly guess the OS or browser family of a browser 90% of the time, and defeat operating system and browser family spoofing 76% of the time. This was done with small training sets of less than 1000 fingerprints, so accuracy with a much larger training set, like the size of the EFF's Panopticlick database should give even better results; you can help prove this, and see what their site thinks your browser family and OS is, by submitting your fingerprint to their site.

Comments

Why would I want to help defeat spoofing?

[scrib]

If a user has gone to the trouble of configuring a browser (or plugin) to spoof which browser they are using, why would I want to help researchers circumvent that?

If there's a good reason to defeat an intentional user choice, I'd love to hear it.