The Electronic Frontier Foundation have come up with an interesting toy called Panopticlick. With the tagline "How unique -- and trackable -- is your browser?" it checks the information you present to every website you visit -- and gives you a score! After clicking the Test Me button I discovered that only one in 165,415 browsers have the same fingerprint as mine and that my fingerprint converys 17.34 bits of identifying information. It then proceeds to list what it's learned.

The interesting figures (for me) were the Browser Plugin Details and System Fonts: 1 in 165,414 and 1 in 3,308 respectively. Though I knew quite a lot of stuff "leaks", I had no idea hosts could pick up such esoteric information.

Panopticlick of course works on a statistical basis, and with a dataset of only "several hundred thousand visitors" so far it's assessment isn't necessarily too sharp at present. Still, an interesting exercise. As they note in the FAQ;

"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: we wanted to make sure people knew they were participating, and let them know — even approximately — how rare/unique they were."

So how unique are you? Add a comment ...!