> I did not ... connect with any of their social media properties
What do you mean by "connect"? Do you mean you didn't visit any of UberVu's social media pages, or that you didn't load any of the tracking-related assets that their website includes? Right now, Ghostery is reporting 5 tracking-related assets on their home page, including something called LeadLander. Click around a bit, and you might even come across assets that are loaded directly from a social media service that you use. Or maybe your browser willingly supplied personally identifiable information to them without telling you about it. Like auto-completing some fields in a hidden form, or automatically connecting to an identity provider that the website happens to support.
Every time I try Panopticlick [1], it tells me that my browser is unique among millions. I guess it means I'm leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere I go, even with AdBlock and Ghostery enabled, and even without logging in anywhere.
I'd say using AdBlock and Ghostery greatly increases the chance you're uniquely identifiable, provided there is a client-side (perhaps non-Java) test to list the browser plugins you use.
At least that is the worst offender to my identity, revealing 21.29+ bits of information.
Trying to strip all identifying bits from your browser is a fool's errand. Strictly speaking, all web users are uniquely identified by the combination of IP address and the timestamp of an HTTP GET. The only reason that's not practically an identifier is that web sites don't have access to the ISP logs necessary to resolve ('192.0.2.0', 'www.example.com', 1354989355) back to you. The question you should be asking is how likely it is that the specific website you're visiting, as opposed to a third-party partner, is snooping your Chrome plugins so it can later resolve your identity against the databases of other websites that you've explicitly visited, who also snoop such data themselves, so that both businesses could identify the extreme minority of users who go to this much trouble to protect their privacy. You're much better off with that risk vs. having dozens of third-party cookies hovering around you.
You'd be surprised. I know quite a few people still using 2.x They (we?) come from an era where you don't upgrade just because there's an upgrade available - you make changes when you're affected by a bug, or something important to you quits working.
Comments
> I did not ... connect with any of their social media properties
What do you mean by "connect"? Do you mean you didn't visit any of UberVu's social media pages, or that you didn't load any of the tracking-related assets that their website includes? Right now, Ghostery is reporting 5 tracking-related assets on their home page, including something called LeadLander. Click around a bit, and you might even come across assets that are loaded directly from a social media service that you use. Or maybe your browser willingly supplied personally identifiable information to them without telling you about it. Like auto-completing some fields in a hidden form, or automatically connecting to an identity provider that the website happens to support.
Every time I try Panopticlick [1], it tells me that my browser is unique among millions. I guess it means I'm leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere I go, even with AdBlock and Ghostery enabled, and even without logging in anywhere.
[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/
I'd say using AdBlock and Ghostery greatly increases the chance you're uniquely identifiable, provided there is a client-side (perhaps non-Java) test to list the browser plugins you use.
At least that is the worst offender to my identity, revealing 21.29+ bits of information.
Trying to strip all identifying bits from your browser is a fool's errand. Strictly speaking, all web users are uniquely identified by the combination of IP address and the timestamp of an HTTP GET. The only reason that's not practically an identifier is that web sites don't have access to the ISP logs necessary to resolve ('192.0.2.0', 'www.example.com', 1354989355) back to you. The question you should be asking is how likely it is that the specific website you're visiting, as opposed to a third-party partner, is snooping your Chrome plugins so it can later resolve your identity against the databases of other websites that you've explicitly visited, who also snoop such data themselves, so that both businesses could identify the extreme minority of users who go to this much trouble to protect their privacy. You're much better off with that risk vs. having dozens of third-party cookies hovering around you.
Don't know how unique I am, but clicking the test button there causes (old, 3.x) Firefox to crash.
>(old, 3.x) Firefox
That should be unique enough... :)
You'd be surprised. I know quite a few people still using 2.x They (we?) come from an era where you don't upgrade just because there's an upgrade available - you make changes when you're affected by a bug, or something important to you quits working.