84% porn visits can be tracked down
By Techgirl

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in USA is the leading civil rights organization to protect its citizens when their freedoms in the networked world come under attack. Founded in 1990, the highly regarded EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights. EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and like Greenpeace values its independence.

Not many Indian men will publicly admit they visit porn sites. Sex is still a taboo topic in most families. My male colleagues tell me that most men are under the impression that by using their browsers ‘Inprivate’ functionality or using a proxy server they can reduce the chances of being outed as purveyors of porn.

But the EFF has just released research which shows that most browsers have unique DNA and at least 84 percent can be tracked back to individuals.

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The results show that the overwhelming majority of Internet users could be uniquely fingerprinted and tracked using only the configuration and version information that their browsers make available to websites. These types of system information should be regarded as identifying, in much the same way that cookies, IP addresses, and supercookies are.

In our analysis of anonymized data from around half a million distinct browsers, 84% had unique configurations. Among browsers that had Flash or Java installed, 94% were unique, and only 1% had fingerprints that were seen more than twice. However, our experiment only studied a limited number of variables, and the companies that offer specialized fingerprinting services are likely to use a wider and therefore more powerful range of measurements.

While almost all browsers are uniquely fingerprintable, there were four special categories that were comparatively resistant to fingerprinting:

1.Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
2.Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements.
3.Mobile devices like Androids and iPhones (unfortunately, these devices tend not to have good interfaces for controlling cookies, and so may be trackable by that method)
4.Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another (Such systems appeared to constitute around 3-4% of the visitors to Panopticlick; unfortunately, there are some fingerprinting techniques like CPU clock skew measurement which would will work against these systems. commercial fingerprinting services employ those techniques).
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Now that this research is public,  will there be fewer visits to porn sites tonight?

Techgoss note:  Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com