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10 Elder
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Cover your tracks
Cover Your Tracks (free on line app) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lets users see how unique and identifiable their browser makes them online. It's also a research project to uncover tools and techniques of online trackers and test the efficacy of privacy add-ons.
Running Cover Your Tracks gives you information about your own browser’s privacy protections, and helps EFF use statistical methods to evaluate the capabilities of third-party trackers and the best forms of protection against them.
I'm using Firefox 93.0 with Strict privacy settings, and according to Cover Your Tracks, it's providing "strong protection against Web tracking, though your software isn’t checking for Do Not Track policies".
The first part of that sounds good, but I have Do Not Track enabled in FF. So I wonder if that means FF doesn't bother to check sites for their Do Not Track policies because it's always sending a Do Not Track signal. And how do we know which sites are actually obeying FF's Do Not Track signal? That's the bigger question.
Bottom line: My browser has a nearly-unique fingerprint with only one in 117692.0 browsers having the same fingerprint. So I'm not totally anonymous but one in 117692 is better than 1 in a Billion browsers.
Be interested to see other scores with different browsers and/or different FF settings to see which ones may give better anonymity.
ky331
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October 21st, 2021 05:00
Similar here, with Microsoft EDGE (Chromium): Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking, though your software isn’t checking for Do Not Track policies.
My browser fingerprint appears to be unique among 232,384 tested (in the past 45 days).
I really have no idea how to interpret this.
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
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October 21st, 2021 10:00
@ky331 Thanks for the info.
The score means -in your case- only one other system out of 232,384 has the same fingerprint. So the bigger that number, the more likely they can specifically ID you.
It's about the number of bits of identifying info your system reveals:
"Browsers usually convey between 5 and 15 bits of identifying information, about 10.5 bits on average. 10 bits of identifying information would allow someone to be picked out of a crowd of 210, or 1024 people. 10.5 bits of information identifies people from crowds of just under 1,448."
So the more bits revealed, the bigger the crowd from which they can specifically pick you out. Geeky details.
Wonder what you'd get if you ran the tests in your sandbox...
ky331
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October 21st, 2021 11:00
1) The fingerprint "uniqueness" number increases every time I run the test... presumably, as more and more people are submitting their browsers for testing.
2) I ran the test on Edge, PaleMoon, and MyPal. In all 3 cases, it said "we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.84 bits of identifying information". These are three distinct/separate browsers (albeit PaleMoon & MyPal "overlap" a great deal), with distinct settings/customizations, but all getting the same # of identifying bits to 2 decimal places??? Something just doesn't feel right about that.
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
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October 21st, 2021 12:00
Did you clear the previous browser's cache, cookies etc before running it the next time in a different browser?
I got 16.6 bits using FF but I don't have 2nd browser on this PC for comparison.
joe53
2 Intern
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October 29th, 2021 21:00
My results, on my latest Edge Chromium browser/Win 10:
"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 230,807 tested in the past 45 days.
Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.82 bits of identifying information."
To my way of thinking, having a unique browser fingerprint is similar to having unique DNA, or even a biological fingerprint. Having unique ID markers, no matter how rare or unique, surely compromises your privacy, and facilitates identification.
Especially when ones browser conveys X bits of identifying information.
I have no way to assess the info from coveryourtracks.