[kictanet] How unique, and trackable, is your browser?

[saidimu apale]

The good folks at EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have a cool research
project on digital privacy:

Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able
> to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies.



Panopticlick <http://panopticlick.eff.org/> tests your browser to see how
> unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits.
> Click below and you will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how
> easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.


Reminds me of a question asked in a presentation in a conference on
computing and its tremendous impact on human life:

- Can we recognize fundamental patterns of human behavior from raw *digital
traces <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_traces>*? (Jon Kleinberg video
at http://bit.ly/7dbuXm)

Kleinberg describes an experiment they conducted using geo-tagged images
from Flickr: they placed those images on a blank digital canvas, using
latlong as co-ordinates on the canvas. A million or so images later, the
images traced a map of the US (complete with canonical images for famous
landmarks). All this without human intervention in placement, or annotation,
of the maps.

Very very very cool.

I think the companies that will set themselves apart are the ones who
harness the power of all these "human sensors" (passive
crowdsourcing<http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2009/11/05/trend-stealth-crowdsourcing/>
).

Why ask someone an explicit question if their body language, and related
signals, says it all?

Saidi
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