How does tracking technology follow your trail around the web, even if you’ve taken protective measures? Cover Your Tracks shows you how trackers see your browser, providing you with an overview of your most unique and identifying characteristics.
Cover Your Tracks is a research project designed to better uncover the tools and techniques of online trackers and test the efficacy of privacy add-ons.
Test your browser to see how well you are protected from tracking and fingerprinting.
When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer’s configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. Some companies use this technology to try to identify individual computers.
In 2010, EFF launched Cover Your Tracks, a research project to investigate how unique each browser is.
In 2015, EFF upgraded Cover Your Tracks with a new feature: tracker blocker testing. Million of Internet users are using privacy add-ons and other tools to block trackers, including tools like AdBlock, Ghostery and Disconnect. But how well do these add-ons actually protect users from invasive tracking?
EFF new version of Cover Your Tracks researches both. It analyze how well you are protected against online tracking by checking the privacy protections you have in place. The test simulates loading of a visible ad that performs tracking, an invisible script that performs tracking, and a site that looks superficially like a tracker but actually has committed to honor Do Not Track.
Cover Your Tracks measures the uniqueness of your browser, creates anonymously log the following information, and compare it to a database of many other Internet users’ configurations.
- The user agent string from each browser
- The HTTP ACCEPT headers sent by the browser
- Screen resolution and color depth
- The Timezone your system is set to
- The browser extensions/plugins, like Quicktime, Flash, Java or Acrobat, that are installed in the browser, and the versions of those plugins
- The fonts installed on the computer, as reported by Flash or Java.
- Whether your browser executes JavaScript scripts
- Yes/no information saying whether the browser accepts various kinds of cookies and “super cookies”
- A hash of the image generated by canvas fingerprinting
- A hash of the image generated by WebGL fingerprinting
- Yes/no whether your browser is sending the Do Not Track header
- Your system platform (e.g. Win32, Linux x86)
- Your system language (e.g. en-US)
- Your browser’s touchscreen support
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