Your Digital Fingerprint is All Over the Internet

They are watching you. And they can track you down. You visit a website thinking all is good, no one knows you were there. But you left your digital fingerprint.

As we were sitting here at work this morning, my IT guy sent me a link to a website that sort of shows how little anonymity  there is when you surf the web – even if you are using an anonymous browser. Even if you disable the cookies on  your browser.

Panopticlick is a website run by EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. According to their website they are blending “the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 61,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public.”

According to EFF, when you visit a website you leave a kind of digital fingerprint. This fingerprint includes a variety of things like the fonts installed and used in your browser, your screen size, resolution, plugins installed, etc. This leaves a unique tracing that can tag your computer to that site.

Granted, it is possible that two or more computers could have the same set of parameters that could tie them to being on a site making the certainty of a correct match not as reliable as a human fingerprint, it is scarily advancing to the point of being able to gather more information to make a unique identity match duplicated more unlikely.

The project at https://panopticlick.eff.org is a projuect that will show you how uniquely identifiable your online surfing is based on the computer you are using.

Remember this the next time you surf the web. It might be harder now to surf anonymously than you previously thought.