Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

Curious:

> We have generated your identifier based on 1 applications you have installed.

    Skype

Then it told me I am ninety-something percent unique...

I find that odd because pretty much every Windows machine has Skype.

View on HN

(I work at FingerprintJS)

You are likely relatively unique because you only have Skype installed, whereas a lot of visitors will have more applications out of the list. Someone who has no applications on the list installed may be even more unique, for example.

> Someone who has no applications on the list installed may be even more unique, for example.

I ran it in a VM with Firefox and nothing else installed. It correctly detected nothing and stated:

> This is your identifier. It was seen 273 times among 3830 tests so far. > That means it is 92.87% unique.

You also have none of the other tested applications; I presume most of them have Word.

> You also have none of the other tested applications; I presume most of them have Word.

What makes you assume I do not have Office installed? Instead of, say, considering the possibility that the fingerprinting may not be that good.

The main clue is that you are not noting that it is misdetecting anything, just that you think what it is that it is detecting is not very special.

I noted that it only detected Skype and nothing else and that app is installed on all Windows machines these days.

Tried again, same deal:

> That means it is 96.35% unique

Reply on news.ycombinator.com