Panopticlick - Internet Privacy

Photo by NeoSpire@FlickrThe WorldWideWeb is a very public place. Information about its users is one of the most valued commodities for companies looking to profit by it.
Modern operating systems and web-browsers matured to keep pace with the evolving nature of the Internet, and so have the data-miners who are always watching and tracking our movements and interactions on the web.

Panopticlick is a new web app recently launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to help us gain a clearer understanding of how we're being tracked and recorded as we surf the web.

A similar story about this subject at CBS

In his post on WebMonkey, Scott Gilbertson described the problem this way:

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.

To test your Internet identifiability and trackability, stop in at the EFF's Panopticlick page and click the "Test Me" button.
The application will reward you with a report detailing any and all information gleaned from your computer. I was somewhat surprised at the scope of the information available from my browser, and the report pointed out one of the less known methods used to track users in their journey across the internet - DOM SessionStorage. But that's another story.

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