On Sat, Sep 22, 2007 at 12:39:25PM -0700, Peter Eckersley wrote: > On Sat, Sep 22, 2007 at 11:36:41 +0100, Mark Brown wrote: > > > > > This means, in practice, that many sites will be able to track > > > Debian users by their User-Agent, even if (say) the user is blocking > > > cookies or limiting them to a single session and is changing IP > > > address regularly. > > > > I would strongly expect that any user sufficiently concerned about > > these issues to take active steps like those would be willing to use > > things like either the user agent configuration availialbe one way or > > another in most browsers or something like privoxy (possibly in > > conjunction with tor) which will do the same things and more. > > I think this misunderstands the problem. Having stronger privacy is > like an insurance policy: most of the people who end up having needed it > never knew they were going to need it. So they weren't going to have > gone out and installed Privoxy (maybe with Tor) /and/ then examined it > closely enough to realise that it doesn't alter their User-Agent by > default, and configured it to masquerade as Firefox on Windows or > something. > I have a feeling that you misunderstand the problem. (Bad analogy time). If you drive a Ford F-150 pickup truck and remove all the Ford badging (the oval, the F-150 badge, etc), then does that make you any more anonymous? If you drive it around town, No. You still have the same license plate. Your truck is still recognizable as a Ford F-150. Besides that, the people who are interested in tracking you are able to track you based on other things as well. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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