John McWilliams | 1 Feb 2012 01:43
Picon

Re: Google changing policy

On 1/30/12   PDT 9:45 AM, clay wrote:
> On 01/28/2012 11:14 AM, »Q« wrote:
>> On Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:00:35 -0800
>> Sailfish<REMOVECAPSsailfish <at> REMOVECAPSunforgettable.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Actually, studies have shown that companies can determine with a high
>>> degree of accuracy who you are by examining your IP for general
>>> location and then examining your browser configuration (platform,
>>> cookies, plugins,&c.) Not courtroom accurate but enough for
>>> marketing purposes.
>>
>> Without using my IP address at all, any site I can connect to can
>> uniquely ID any of the browsers I use if it wants to.
>>
>> <https://panopticlick.eff.org/>
>
> If we run this test twice in a row, we shouldn't increase the count
> since our browser is not 'unique' compared to our browser...
> I did and numbers ....799 and ....800 were unique.
> Either my browser changed from one test to the next, not much use in
> identifying it..., or the test is flawed.

Well, it's flawed all right, but is interesting anyway. I tried on four 
different browsers on one machine, and my fonts were first "fully 
unique", then half unique, then by a third, and then a fourth. So it was 
tracking and computing on that correctly.

Gmane