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browser security – Tales from the bits http://talesfromthebits.com This is a blog about technology, computer science, software engineering and personal notes from these fields Fri, 17 Jun 2016 16:53:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.16 The Shocking Truth About Internet Privacy http://talesfromthebits.com/2014/09/the-shocking-truth-about-internet-privacy.html http://talesfromthebits.com/2014/09/the-shocking-truth-about-internet-privacy.html#respond Tue, 16 Sep 2014 17:48:27 +0000 http://talesfromthebits.com/?p=765 Is Internet privacy one of your concerns? Do you know how many companies are tracking you? You cleared your browser’s cookies and you think that all the tracking of your activities is gone. You used the private browsing option of your browser and you think that no one is tracking you online. You selected the option “Do Not Track” of your browser and you think that is enough.

You are so wrong!

Your online activity is tracked with Browser Fingerprinting.

What is Browser Fingerprinting?

Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed in 2010 that from a sample of 470,161 browsers who participated in the experiment, 84% produced unique fingerprints. (94 % including those that supported Adobe Flash or a Java Virtual Machine). The attributes that fingerprinting was based on included  user’s screen size, time zone, browser plugins and a set of installed fonts. All these attributes create a unique fingerprint for a computer.

IEEE Spectrum has a detailed article on how web advertisers stealthily monitor our browsing habits.

How can I test my browser?

You can test and see your browser’s fingerprint here.

There are a couple of tools (browser add-ons) that you can use. Two of them are Lightbeam and Ghostery.

Ghostery is available for all the major browsers. Ghostery has the largest tracker database available on the web. Ghostery profiles and culls over 1,900 trackers and 2,200 tracking patterns.

Lightbeam is a Firefox add-on that uses interactive visualizations to show you the first and third party sites you interact with on the Web.

What are your thoughts?

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