There are plenty of virtues to using a VPN, but it won't fool this fingerprinting technique.įor the last year or so, I've participated in a study on fingerprinting conducted by the computer science department at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). You can install the best VPN in the world and use it to spoof your IP address so that you appear to be in Timbuktu, but doing so doesn't change your fingerprint. One thing that's not required to identify you with a unique fingerprint is your IP address. What extensions have you installed? Which fonts are available on this device? What is the precise version of the browser? The OS? Trackers now use algorithms that process this data into a fingerprint that uniquely identifies you. Your browser reveals a huge amount of information about itself and your PC to any website that asks. However, new fingerprinting techniques eliminate the need for any such file. Your Online FingerprintĪll the cookie solutions I mentioned depend on maintaining a file (the cookie) on your PC. Advertisers already moved on to using Silverlight cookies, self-repairing evercookies, and a host of other technologies to track you. Modern browsers include a setting to block the use of third-party cookies, but it doesn't really matter. Suddenly those cookies don't taste so good. When the same ad shows up on a different website, the advertiser records that site in the cookie, building up a profile of the sites you visit. Each advertisement on a page has its own URL, and it can plant what's called a third-party cookie (third-party because it's not directly involved in your interaction with the website). However, advertisers quickly learned that they could use cookies to track you from site to site. Since the cookie only contains data that you willingly gave to the website, it doesn't sound like a privacy problem. This lets a site remember you as you surf among its different pages, or leave and come back for another visit. The website that created the cookie can read back the data it contains, but other sites can't touch it. A cookie is a text file that resides on your computer. You've just entered your screen name on a webpage you don't want to enter it again when you click to another page on the same site.Ĭookies were an early solution to this problem. Therein lies the potential for much frustration. If your browser sends another request, it's a whole new interaction. Your browser sends an HTTP request, the website responds to the request, and then it immediately forgets you. Tossing Your CookiesĪt its very simplest, your browser's interaction with a website is like a conversation with Dory, the blue tang from Finding Nemo. But before I dig deeper into the product's functionality, a little background is in order. Scheduling that automated clearing for once per hour brought it to 100, the maximum. Enabling automatic cookie clearing in all my browsers raised the score. Fortunately, TrackOFF makes the path to a better score very clear. Of course, I wanted the best privacy score 70 percent didn't seem so good. Your estimated privacy score goes up as you accomplish this initial configuration. The program automatically installs extensions for Internet Explorer and Edge, and walks you through the process of enabling its extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.
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