How Unique Is Your Web Browser?

By Peter Eckersley. International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2010

954 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82aaf21ef0b8b1bdff3d232295f78dec5a377ccf

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Citations in the corpus

Protecting privacy when mining and sharing user data (2012, background): “Recent work [51] successfully applies this observation to uniquely identify browsers based on characteristics such as user agent and timezone information that browsers make available to websites.”
FPDetective: dusting the web for fingerprinters (2013, methodology): “Eckersley used Java and Flash to obtain the list of fonts installed in a device [7], since font-enumeration API calls are made available by the Flash and Java plugins.”
Smart, useful, scary, creepy: perceptions of online behavioral advertising (2012, background): “However, there exist myriad means of uniquely profiling a particular computer, ranging from browser fingerprinting [7] to using Flash Local Shared Objects (LSOs), HTML5 local storage, or other methods of maintaining a unique identifier on a user’s computer over time [18].”
Dissent in Numbers: Making Strong Anonymity Scale (2012, neutral): “anonymous browsing environment, an important issue given that browser signatures have a reasonable chance of uniquely identifying a user [27].”
Improved website fingerprinting on Tor (2013, background): “However, a user making a significant change to her browser configuration would cause her to become more easily identifiable [6].”
Device Fingerprinting in Wireless Networks: Challenges and Opportunities (2015, background): “Eckersley [42] shows that modern web browsers provide the version and configuration”
Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis (2016, methodology): “For the last step, we run two synchronized measurements (see Alternative tracking-protection lists exist, such as the list built into the Ghostery browser extension and the domain-based list provided by Disconnect 10 .”
Display Advertising with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Behavioural Targeting (2016, background): “A study by [Eckersley, 2010] showed 94.2% of browsers with Flash or Java were unique, while [Soltani et al., 2010] found 54 of the 100 most popular sites stored Flash cookies.”
Engineering Privacy by Design (2011, background): “Similarly, it is important to sanitize the connection so that users cannot be recognized based on cookies or their browser configuration [19].”
The Long-Standing Privacy Debate: Mobile Websites vs Mobile Apps (2017, background): “Although each option may have different benefits, in this paper, we are interested in exploring their privacy-related characteristics.”
Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web (2012, background): “There are many speciﬁc ways that identifying information might be gleaned (e.g., browser ﬁngerprinting [4], ETags [2], and Flash cookies [21]) but little assessment of how tracking is integrated with web browsing in practice.”
Pixel Perfect : Fingerprinting Canvas in HTML 5 (2012, background): “Therefore, our <canvas> fingerprints must only contain image resources that are under our control.”
AccelPrint: Imperfections of Accelerometers Make Smartphones Trackable (2014, methodology): “Another approach of the software based fingerprinting is to exploit the browser properties and plugins to figure out unique identifiers [23].”
Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology (2012, background): “A website may be able to learn properties about the browser that, taken together, form a unique or nearly unique identifier [95], [96].”
The TellTail of Embeddings: Fingerprinting Retrievers in Black-Box Systems (2026, unknown): “…of a system from its observable behavior is known as fingerprinting , a side-channel attack and long-standing security primitive used, among others, to identify a host’s operating system from network traffic [29] or a user’s browser from parameters it transmits and device characteristics [30].”