Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Check your browser's tracking protection

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a tool called Cover Your Tracks that will analyze your browser and add-ons to see how well you are protected against online tracking techniques. It also checks to see if your system is uniquely configured (therefore identifiable) even if you are using privacy protection software. The report is quite comprehensive and includes informative links.

Not directly related to the above, but of interest to those of us who are DuckDuckGo users, the EFF has partnered with Duck to enhance secure browsing and protect user information on the Web.

Thanks for the link.

It first said that my browser is "nearly unique," whatever that means relative to the real world, but several retests said "unique."

Multiple retests now say "nearly unique," so I guess that's it.

The details aren't at all consistent, though.

In this case, being Unique is NOT a good thing as it means you are uniquely identifiable. As to the variance, the devil is in the details. To quote the report on my browser…
which would indicate uniqueness could change from minute to minute or even second to second depending on the other browsers tested.
So there are likely other untested factors that could make you more unique. If you want to be less unique then download every different browser you can find and randomly rotate the one you use each time you go to a different web site and connect to the internet through a VPN and change the VPN connection every few minutes. You may still have some unique characteristic but it would be harder to pinpoint.

Frankly I am more interested in...

FOOTNOTE: I just tested the most secure browser and connection I know, TOR using onion routing and it reported…
…and that was at TOR's Safer setting and not its Safest. (The safest setting only works for static sites with basic services.)

I tested and retested multiple times in quick succession, and my degree of uniqueness changed each time, sometimes by degrees that seem unusual. I wonder how many people are using this tool at any given time?

I still don't understand the significance of uniqueness. I've never seen any targeted ads, and the whole concept seems more oriented towards targeting specific individuals.

I see the same thing, and it seems to be self-contradictory.

The point of Cover Your Tracks is to let you know how vulnerable you are to tracking and data mining. The more unique your online identity the easier it is to track where you go and what you do on the internet.

Trackers are seldom interested in the result of a single transaction rather the result of putting together many tiny, seemingly insignificant, data points to form a coherent, and frighteningly accurate, picture of you. In order to do that there must be a common factor used to identify which bits belong to which individual person. If your identity is the same as 3000 others and say 100 data points are needed for an accurate match then there 90,000,000,000+ possible combinations out of which only one is an accurate representation of you. If your identity is unique then any set of data linked to that identity contributes to an accurate representation of you. If I am a data miner I want that unique identifier. If I am trying to avoid data mining I want that identifier to be as non-unique as possible.

I understand all of that.

But as I've said before (when we discussed my password scheme), data mining is only an issue if you've been targeted.

The Internet can generate an awful lot of needless paranoia!

I'd like to argue the point but I can't stay and talk right now. I gotta keep moving. I'm being followed.