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Panopticlick is hyperbole. Yes you can be tracked and you should be worried about it but the stats they report are not valid. Take an iPhone10 in California an
by greggman2 7y ago
Panopticlick is hyperbole. Yes you can be tracked and you should be worried about it but the stats they report are not valid.
Take an iPhone10 in California and visit the site. They'll tell you you're in a million in 1 or one in 500k people.
All iPhone10s have exactly the same signature. They only differences at most are region settings and time zone. If you're in california those are likely the same for 95%? 90%? 80%? I doesn't matter to my point.
How many iPhones10s are there in that time zone? I think there are like 55million people in that time zone (Seattle + Portland + Bay Area + Los Angeles + San Diego). How many of those own an iPhhone10? Let's be what I think is conservative and pick 1 million. Now compare that number to the number you go from panopticlick and you'll see their stats are off by several orders of magnitude.
Their excuse is they don't get that many visitors but it's only useful to track you on popular sites with lots of visitors. If you go to a site with few visitors then you're already unique. Any sight with lots of visitors will have lots of iPhone10 users in the same time zone with the same region settings and so tracking you is much harder.
Of course I'm not saying you shouldn't be worried about tracking and if you're on Windows/Linux/Mac/Android your device is likely much more unique. My only point is that it exaggerates given that there is popular hardware that has the same signature it should be reporting different numbers for those devices.
- bowmessage 7y ago> All iPhone10s have exactly the same signature. Not quite, this varies depending on the browser app used, zoom level set, language set, other accessibility settings, etc. etc.
- gruez 7y ago>Not quite, this varies depending on the browser app used Most users either use safari or chrome. Maybe 2 bits of entropy at best. >zoom level set [...] other accessibility settings, etc. etc. 95% (random guess) of users don't have these changed from the default because they don't have vision problems or other accessibility needs. >language set The parent post said it was in California, so en-US is a pretty safe assumption.
- bowmessage 7y agohttps://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-spoken-languages-in-california.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-spoken-language...
- greggman2 7y agoGood to know but irrelevant to my point. My point was panopticlick says some iPhone10 in the PST time zone set to en-US running Safari is one in 500k. If there are 55million people the PST timezone then panopticlick is basically saying there are only 110 iPhone10s set to en-US in all of the PST time zone. That's clearly false.
- willvarfar 7y agoPanopticlick’s stats are definitely biased by the kind of people who visit, and who visit multiple times etc. But it is a very useful way to get us all to think about tracking. The kind of techies who discover the problem by reading about it on HN might very well be the kind of techies to make the next stride in defeating it.