EFF Reveals How Your Digital Fingerprint Makes You Easy to Track

Think that turning off cookies and turning on private browsing makes you invisible on the web? Think again.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new web app dubbed Panopticlick that reveals just how scarily easy it is to identify you out of millions of web users.

The problem is your digital fingerprint. Whenever you visit a site, your browser and any plug-ins you have installed can leak data. Some of it isn’t very personal, like your user agent string. Some of it is more personally revealing, like which fonts you have installed. But the what if you put it all together? Would the results make you identifiable? As the EFF says, “this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer.”