TIGSource Forums

Apparently we can be tracked. (http://panopticlick.eff.org/)

Not really news. The whole Anonymous thing has always been an illusion. It's much easier to track you and find out information about you than most people think, and there are gigantic companies that have more info about you stored in their servers than you'd like to know about.

yep but i can change the fingerprint by adding removing fonts... not counting changing other simple parameters, not like most of them are static.
Font is the thing that change most in my computer

The report had a section on that:

Websites that I visit can see the fonts that I have? Say it ain't so!

Isn't the obvious solution to offer a browser with very few configurable features? Then the browser will be difficult to track. Even if you only had ten-thousand adopters or so (a reasonable figure, I'd think) that's enough to help you hide if that matters to you.

Reminds me of the guy that posted his club card information online so that anyone could buy things under that account to get discounts and be untrackable.

-SirNiko

Alternatively, you can just not do things on the internet that you wouldn't want to be tracked doing.

Unless you use proxies.

It said my computer matched 1 in around 1000 when I had NoScript enabled.  When I enabled JS, the button caused Firefox to crash.  I guess it's good to know that my browser would rather die than give up certain information?

Hahahahaha my fingerprint is unique. 1 in 1950000.  :ninja:
They got roughly 10 bits of information from me.

Thank you Firefox/Ghostery/NoScript/Greasemonkey/Adblock/No cookies

Great, apparently I'm also unique.  Yaaaaay.

Wait I got nothing to hide.  :giggle:

...or so you think! Mauhahaha  :mockangry:

Oh no!  :whome:

This sounds dubious.

Someone listed 1,950,000 unique people, but when I just used it now I got Unique in 1,011,415.  How did the number of unique identities go down?

And I think I win with 19.55 bits of information.  I got a lotta crap.

Okay, but you realise that you want to be less unique to make yourself more difficult to identify, right?



You have an unrealistic and mildly disturbing conception of humanity, it seems

Okay, now it is giving me different results every time.

1 in 200000, and suddenly less information.

Also, the listed time zone is wrong  :eyebrows:

Edit: I think tons of NoScripters are using this now. Down to 150000

Better be careful; with that paranoia of others seeing what you do on your computer you might end up on an FBI watchlist or two :giggle:

Same as me! Although I was unique among 1,011,644 tested, apparently.

Just wanted to add that I agree with Corpus. This is something extremely unrealistic to expect of people. many peple have secret lives or hobbies that don't really harm anyone but could cause them great trouble if these were found out. Or are you saying that a gay man cannot talk with other gays through the internet because he lives somewhere deep in redneck country?

I thought people had been doing this for a while.  :giggle:

Hay gaiz lets maek a browzer that deevolgez zeevo info about alls us so we canz stai anonymouse.

Just let people have this information. Yes, they use it to personally identify you. You can press charges to the whole company or entity if they use this information against you,(IE blackmail) but in no way is that likely to happen. Just saying.

They only got me because of my damned addons. Appearently not everyone is carrying adblock, greasemonkey w/ several scripts, Imacros, quickfox notes, FoxyProxy, ImTranslator, Java, ReloadEvery, ReframeIt, and a file converter...but they should.

Hah! Beating you both! 19.95.

I think 19.95 is the max, as I have more than that in my addons group alone.

Fun fact: You give up your intertubes anonymity as soon as you click that "search" button on http://www.google.com (http://www.google.com).

Mine says I have 19.95 bits of identifying information, and I'm one in 1,014,979. Strangely, it only managed to detect the resolution of one of my screens.
But what are the bits of information? surely less identifying bits would be better, or have I fundamentally misunderstood it.

I feel that you may have missed TLB's point. The fact that it's possible to identify you through the internet doesn't put you in danger of getting bashed by rednecks if you're posting about being gay online, but it does mean that it would be advisable to not perform actual crimes through the internet as you could be punished. Obviously you wouldn't want to be tracked by the metaphorical rednecks on the metaphorical gay chatroom, but as that's unlikely to happen at best the choice of analogy was misleading.
You "wouldn't want to be tracked" as part of a child porn/blackcap hacking/insert misc stereotypical netcrime here ring a little (lot) more seriously than you'd not want to be tracked on a chatroom that people around you wouldn't approve of.
I just feel that you and Corpus both interpreted his (admittedly fairly contextually sensitive and interpretive) statement incorrectly, but it could be that I've done that.

I have 19.95(+? looks like it might be the maximum) bits of info on me and am unique. hmn.

I would strongly recommend you to read 1984 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four), if you haven't already.

The right to privacy is not about being able to hide crimes.

No, obviously, but you have to quite a bit of work to find out anything important about someone somewhere just based on how they use the internet. It gets fucked up when you have organisations actually collecting data on people, but the fact that you leave a footprint shouldn't come as a shock nor should it be seen as an invasion of privacy.

Social networking could easily be interpreted as waiving that "right" quite often ;) (see albums of images full of someone's life sometimes publicly available, addresses, schools, and willingness to "add" as many people as possible) (this isn't to be considered entirely seriously)

1984 is amazing by the way, it's interesting you bring it up.

There is a common attitude that says:
"the only reason you would want privacy is to hide something bad/criminal"

1984 shows where you can end up with such an attitude.

If you don't think like that, I simply misunderstood what you were trying to say. My bad :)

You signature just made me want to hug you by the way (only thing I'm dubious about it teetotaling :beer:), and no, I don't think like that.

My point was that it's valid advice to suggest not doing something you wouldn't want to be tracked doing when using a medium for doing the something that you can be tracked through oh god that sentence is horrible, in any case it got horribly tangled because I tangled everything into a terrible mess of a statement. I'm going to go to sleep now and see if this is still here in the morning; I'm miscommunicating everything and I'll just end up saying something I don't agree with. It wasn't your bad you didn't understand, it was mine.
(:noir:)

I want privacy when I'm in private. I personally don't expect privacy when I'm out in the public. Being on the internet is being out in the public, as far as I'm concerned, even though you most of the time access it from the privacy of your home.

A human hug for you!
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=437.msg383428#msg383428

Well, I have 19.95+ in both addons and fonts, plus 30 elsewhere. Looks like I'll be pretty unique for a while :P In fact both my addons sections and font sections are unique on their own.

So... Websites know if I have comic sans installed? How embarrassing...  :-[

I'm unique among ~4500. I noticed that the user agent string was the most identifying item for me, so I anonymised it with an about:config override. Then I was unique among ~1 090 000... So scrubbing your identifiable strings makes you MORE unique (logical when you think about it). Damned if you do, damned if you don't, eh? So if you want to be anonymous you actually need to find the most common ID:s and override yours with them.

unique among 1,016,455 tested so far

Hah! I win!

They only got my user agent and the HTTP accept headers... And somehow I'm the only one with the latest Firefox and JavaScript + cookies disallowed in 340,000 people? Really? What the hell are the rest doing?? Using Internet Explorer 6, probably.

Actually, I believe in that catgory there are 3, including you, since my ratio there is 1019669 to 1.

1:3k, 11.something b/o info with javascript disabled
unique, 19.96 with jscript enabled.

we're tied

You actually have far more than 19.96, that's just its current cap.

So what does that 19.96 number actually mean? Can anyone explain
it to me...

Its currently the maximum amount of bits that the program is willing to count. The cap seems to be rising slowly over time, but I dont know what specifically makes it rise.

But they're called "bits of identifying information" so surley fewer would be better?

I think it largely depends on the average "bits of identifying information" that people have. Even if yours is low, if most people have some more bits than you do, you should still have higher chance of being unique. Well, that's my guess anyway.

Also, wouldn't being unique also be bad? Because it means you can be more eaisily singled out and traced? I'm simply trying to understand the system here, if anyone has ant more knowelege than me, and not just inferred half truths (again, like me lol) then please tell me. I'm mightily confused...

In actually, bits dont mean a damned thing, its sort of like a fun fact that they throw in there just as an FYI. The more relavent part is your 1 in xxx people, which shows your uniqueness overall...which is bad.

So a lower xxx is better?

Right. If you're 1 in 1,000,000, they can track you among a million other people. If it's 1 in 2, they can't identify you from the next bloke that visits their site.

More like, if its 1 in 2, there's a 50 percent chance they can differentiate you and the guy next to you. At one in a million their chances of not being able to differentiate you two is about .0001 percent.

On other hand, Google just started offering secure searches on their engine (SSL). More secure searches! Now I can search for stuff I didn't want others to know of.  :whome:

Here I come, Barbie dolls!

Except Google. They know everything. They have all your shames saved in their servers. They just need a reason.

This is all part of their plan to take over.
Also, it is a good thing to be unique despite the consequences because...
That's indie.

I assume all my shames.
Also: all true paranoids will not click on that OP link. Just saying.

yup, i didn't

i can guess how it works though from the thread; sounds pretty clever

A little fancy Cracked article about the subject. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18532_5-terrifying-ways-your-own-gadgets-can-be-used-to-spy-you.html)

Haha, tree dick.

And now you're no longer a virgin.

Yeah, no one's really anonymous on the Internet, but as long as you make sure not to talk to crazy people, you'll be fine.

Unless the reptilians decide you're an insurgent.

They'll rape your mind with their zeta beams.