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You may be unique, but within a very small pool. For example, my current user agent string alone narrows me down to within one in ~2-3 million users/browsers. W
by chimeracoder 14y ago
You may be unique, but within a very small pool. For example, my current user agent string alone narrows me down to within one in ~2-3 million users/browsers. When taken with the intersection of all those other bits, it's very easy to get an incredibly high-resolution snapshot of an individual...
- what_ever 14y agoSame here.
- thebooktocome 14y agoI have no idea what "unique, but within a very small pool" is supposed to mean. Unique means "only one."
- manaskarekar 14y agoOne in a million. One in a billion. Do you think those two are the same?
- chimeracoder 14y agoAck, typo. What I meant to say was that, even if you're not completely uniquely identified by your information, if you're so rare that only a few people on earth have your information, it's just as bad.
- gfosco 14y agoI'm looking at this from a different direction. I don't want my fingerprint to be unique, unless it is truly random on every request. I don't want any server to be able to tie any two requests of mine together without my permission (in the form of headers/cookies). That's the whole cookie/tracking argument right there. If you are isolated from a crowd, unique, then you can be tracked and analyzed. I used Panopticlick, and no one else who has used Panopticlick had the same fingerprint. The meat of the uniqueness was in Browser Plugins and System Fonts. Think about that... If you've installed a few random fonts you found online, you're probably sending a unique font signature. If you've grabbed a few plugins, messed around with extensions, then you're probably sending a unique plugin signature.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]