Online privacy issues are something we’re always conscious about in working on our projects. We gain useful insights into our products by tracking web visitors using Google Analytics, but these same techniques can also be used to maliciously track visitors online.

Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tool that analyzes how unique your browser fingerprint is.  I found it quite interesting that all three browsers on my work computer had unique fingerprints among the 104,584 tests that the site had conducted thus far.

In particular it’s interesting to see how little information needs to be looked at to be unique.   For instance, in Internet Explorer my User Agent string by itself is unique among all of the tests.  The same applies to my combination of browser plugin versions.   In Firefox my User Agent string appears in 1 out of 23.62 browsers, but my browser plugin combination is unique across all of the tests conducted thus far.

How do your browsers compare?  Panopticlick