Panopticlick

So you think you can be quite anonymous online? Think again. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based organisation fighting for civil rights in the electronic age has released a project called Panopticlick (a play of the word "panopticon") which tries to identify your computer through information about it freely available to websites.

You can read more about it here. Basically, the gist is that stuff like time zones, system fonts and user agents can create a fingerprint of your computer. (Being a privacy rights advocate, the data collected are anonymous.)

For my computer, even with javascript switched off, Panopticlick reports that,

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors, only one in 8,016 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

With javascript enabled,

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 609,232 tested so far.

The dead giveaway (for javascript-enabled testing) is my highly customised browser plugins and system fonts, both of which are completely unique amongst all tested. Fortunately, I have nothing to hide; if I had, I'd be physically scrubbing my hard drive with scotch brite and WD40.