Does Panopticlick Prove that Anonymous Browsing is Dead?

Earlier today, we exposed the fact that it’s unwise to be absolutely carefree while online, because if you upload anything that at all can put you in a poor light, you can bet that someone will find it. In the case of that news post, it could be an employer, and that can have obvious consequences. So with that in mind, are you looking to take the opposite route and cover up your tracks online as much as possible?

Before you spend time an energy on your new-found goals, you may want to pay attention to an experiment that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently working on, called “Panopticlick”. If you’ve ever paid any attention to the ways that you can be tracked online, you’re likely aware that cookies, IP addresses and browser information can have a lot to do with it. Where the first and last are concerned, browsers like Chrome have built-in functions in order to cover these up as much as possible.

But, believe it or not, having your browser omit these bits of information may not be enough, and with this experiment, it appears that it is possible to be identified via other means, namely by aggregating your browser information and potentially coming up with an overall value, or digit, to identify you by. This is similar to programs that create an ID based on your exact PC configuration.

What kind of information could be used for this purpose? For one, your “User Agent”, which is essentially a long string that has everything to do with your browser, its version, your OS, language and so forth. That one line alone is pretty thorough, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s not too common to share the exact same value with someone else, but it certainly happens. Here’s what mine looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100131 Gentoo Firefox/3.6

For the most part, that bit of information is rather minor, and for advertisers, as an example, more information would be required in order to declare one PC as being truly unique. Browser plugins are taken into consideration, which can result in your seemingly non-unique configuration being shown as unique to an advertiser. To further this, things like time zones can be used to fine-tune some more, along with screen resolution, color depth, system fonts and so forth.

This is a rather interesting experiment being held here, and I admit that this is something I’ve pondered in the past, so it’s great to see it put to action like this. If you want to see just how unique your configuration is, you can go to the site below and be tested. After the test, you will be told whether or not your setup is unique, and also see how many configurations have been tested so far. On three of my PCs, all were unique, and this was with almost half a million test results. Not a good sign! Perhaps “anonymous browsing” isn’t so anonymous after all.

When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer’s configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. Some companies are already using technology to try to identify individual computers. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?