When you hear web tracking you probably think cookie. FYI consider Side Channel Leakage (insert Depends joke here) . Without cookies you can be uniquely identified 99% of the time if JavaScript runs on your browser [ Firefox w/ NoScript ]. Remember these are ways to uniquely identify you w/o 3rd party cookies. Taken together according to EFF Panopticlick Experiment you can be identified +99% of the time w/o looking at cookies.
Remember that each bit of information divides the world in half. Screen depth / resolution Time zone and UTC skew - how many seconds, nay milliseconds are you offset from UTC. What browser plugins are installed Font innumeration - did you install Adobe before OO or OO / Office. Many apps install fonts. The order in which fonts were installed on your system is unique to your system. Which browser and version of browser and the update history of that browser. Updates: other. Did you install every MS update, Just SPs or SP2, three hotfixes then SP3. How granular did you apply those flash updates. You update path for each application and the OS helps uniquely identify you. Items in your browser's cache. The cache hits/misses in your desktop's browser cache. Ah, your MAC address accessible via JavaScript in your browser. Just a taste. More from see show notes of SN 264 at http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/Security_Now_264 or the listen to one of my favorite podcasts at http://twit.tv/sn264 I do not wear a Tin Foil Hat but was surprised at all the ways we can be tracked besides the cookies we all know about. BK | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org |
