Nov 28, 2020, 23:06 pm
(This post was last modified: Nov 28, 2020, 23:07 pm by Resurgence. Edited 1 time in total.)
Today, we’re pleased to announce Cover Your Tracks, the newest edition and rebranding of our historic browser fingerprinting and tracker awareness tool Panopticlick. Cover Your Tracks picks up where Panopticlick left off. Panopticlick was about letting users know that browser fingerprinting was possible; Cover Your Tracks is about giving users the tools to fight back against the trackers, and improve the web ecosystem to provide privacy for everyone.
Over a decade ago, we launched Panopticlick as an experiment to see whether the different characteristics that a browser communicates to a website, when viewed in combination, could be used as a unique identifier that tracks a user as they browse the web. We asked users to participate in an experiment to test their browsers, and found that overwhelmingly the answer was yes—browsers were leaking information that allowed web trackers to follow their movements.
In this new iteration, Cover Your Tracks aims to make browser fingerprinting and tracking more understandable to the average user. With helpful explainers accompanying each browser characteristic and how it contributes to their fingerprint, users get an in-depth look into just how trackers can use their browser against them.
Our browsers leave traces of identifiable information. These traces can be combined into a unique identifier which follows users’ browsing of the web.
Users can also “cover their tracks,” protecting themselves by installing extensions like our own Privacy Badger.
Test your browser here:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
EFF's Privacy Badger Add-on for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox...-badger17/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/in...our-tracks
Over a decade ago, we launched Panopticlick as an experiment to see whether the different characteristics that a browser communicates to a website, when viewed in combination, could be used as a unique identifier that tracks a user as they browse the web. We asked users to participate in an experiment to test their browsers, and found that overwhelmingly the answer was yes—browsers were leaking information that allowed web trackers to follow their movements.
In this new iteration, Cover Your Tracks aims to make browser fingerprinting and tracking more understandable to the average user. With helpful explainers accompanying each browser characteristic and how it contributes to their fingerprint, users get an in-depth look into just how trackers can use their browser against them.
Our browsers leave traces of identifiable information. These traces can be combined into a unique identifier which follows users’ browsing of the web.
Users can also “cover their tracks,” protecting themselves by installing extensions like our own Privacy Badger.
Test your browser here:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
EFF's Privacy Badger Add-on for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox...-badger17/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/in...our-tracks