Most browsers leave fingerprint that can ID users

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Most browsers leave fingerprint that can ID users

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco •

The vast majority of people surfing the web leave behind digital fingerprints that can be used to uniquely identify them, research released Monday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests.

Using a website that compares visitors' browser configurations to a database of almost 1 million other users, EFF researchers found that 84 percent of visitors used setting combinations that were unique. When The Register visited the site using Firefox, it received a message that read: "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 837,411 tested so far." (Turning off javascript and Java with the NoScript plugin didn't change the results we got on one test PC, but on a second machine, use of NoScript significantly increased the number of browsers with the same fingerprint.)

EFF said that its logs are anonymized, but there's nothing stopping the organization - or indeed, any website in the world - from constructing a database of digital fingerprints belonging to each person who visits the site.

Story - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/17/browser_fingerprint/