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.)
