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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

"Do not track" is completely useless. Somewhat ironically, it actually has the opposite effect: The "Do not track" boolean contributes to your digital fingerprint.

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"The 'Do not track' boolean contributes to your digital fingerprint."

I always thought that and that's why I didn't turn it on.

Unfortunately, there's probably enough data to identify you anyway, regardless of DNT setting: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

I feel that the methodology of that site reports your browser as more unique than it really is. For one, it doesn't take into account that plugins/browsers are constantly getting updated. This causes the user-agent string and the plugin names to constantly change, causing the site to report more entropy than there really is. For instance, I'm using firefox on windows 8.1. Based on the market share of windows 8.1 (13%) and firefox (11%), the chance that another browser has the same user-agent should be 1 in 70. However panopticlick reports 1 in 943.29. Similarly, panopticlick reports that 1 in 7596.81 uses the latest version of the NPAPI flash plugin.

It's a proof of concept. The numbers are dependent upon people visiting that page. As they say in their FAQ:

> The quality of data that we get from this project is definitely decreased as a result of the fact that the design of the website encourages people to play with their browser configurations. A lot of people are doing things like turning off javascript, entering private browsing mode, or deleting cookies just to see what effects those actions have on uniqueness.

> We'd have gotten better data by putting these tests in an invisible corner of a high-traffic website, but that simply isn't the EFF way when it comes to running an experiment like this

Yeah, the numbers seem very suspect. It says, for example, that 1 in 1.34 (ie, only about 75%) of all browsers have cookies enabled. Considering that these days, you basically need that for things to work:

1) They're probably getting a very skewed sample, and

2) They're probably counting bots that hit the site.

It's possible that very few visitors of panopticon use W8.1.

I'm using Firefox ESR on Linux64 and I get 1 in 550.

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