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Your Online Fingerprint Gives You Away
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on May 21st, 2010)
If there's one thing that adult webmasters like to protect when they're online it's their privacy. Just like many other ordinary people and business people, we don't want others to know who we are or what we're doing. We use nicknames on message boards and in forums, we use email accounts that aren't obviously linked to our real names and we generally try to protect ourselves.
Despite what some people might say we protect our identities because it's the prudent thing to do and it's not just adult webmasters who do it ... you only have to take a wander through a forum such as Webmaster World and you will find the vast majority of members protect their identities by using nicknames.
And it's the same in just about every mainstream forum whether it be a special interest group such as a 4x4 club or a bunch of knitters. We do it because we like our privacy but now it seems that some people may know a whole lot more about us than we would really want them to know and it wasn't all that hard for them to get the information because you and I gave it to them.
Sure, we might not have known that we were giving it to them and they may not yet know our names but they have enough identifying information to know our likes and dislikes ... what we buy and what we wish we could buy ... and even what we sell if we do sell products online.
While these faceless people who gather the information say that they're going to use the information for our benefit there's nothing stopping them from using it against us and even though we may want to stop passing our information on to others it seems that ... at the moment ... there's no way for us to stop that transfer of information.
And how are we passing that information on to people we don't know ... may have never heard of ... and certainly wouldn't want to have our personal information? We are doing it through our browsers.
But don't immediately jump to the conclusion that we're doing it via cookies that might be downloaded when we visit a website ... this is not about cookies ... this is about what some are calling our virtual fingerprint that can be matched to individual computers and a unique signature that most web browsers produce. And while you can block cookies you can't block or prevent your virtual fingerprint from being picked up from your browser.
While the fact that this information is being passed on by our web browsers is only now being made public it's actually something that has been happening for some years and there are already several companies that are selling products that claim to use browser fingerprinting to help their clients' websites to accurately identify the likes and dislikes of individuals who are visiting those websites.
Some recent research done by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has shown just how accurate the information collected via the virtual fingerprint can be. The Foundation looked at a database of information collected from almost a million visitors to a website and discovered that 84 per cent of the data collection could clearly identify which individual browser was looking at the website.
That number grew by a further 10 per cent if the browser had Flash or Java installed and while a browser's fingerprint might change over time it was not difficult to identify each browser's new fingerprint.
So what have you been looking at today? What interesting but completely unexplained pop-ups and offers have been appearing on your browser screen and left you wondering how they got there?
What have you been doing online that you would prefer others not know about?
While businesses may be offering us things that we might be interested in buying most of us won't be too alarmed that our online movements are so obvious but what happens if our virtual fingerprints become admissible in Court? What if our virtual fingerprints fall into the hands of criminals?
And to think that we thought we were secure and the only people we had to worry about were the likes of Google and any of the others who wanted to track our search habits. It's obvious that there really is no such thing as privacy online and, even though we may not have known what we were doing, we've given up a lot more information about ourselves than we would ever want to do.
Now there's no hiding behind nicknames and non-identifying email addresses ... now we've laid our soul bare to whoever it is that gathers this information and they know plenty about us.
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