Your Internet Browsers leave a unique “hand-print” on the Net
The assumption that an Internet user can be recognized by his IP address and his Cookie files only was proven to be incorrect. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Organization has launched their own online-test Panopticlick(http://panopticlick.eff.org/) which is designed to demonstrate how easy it is to recognize the needed machine profile among hundreds of others on the Net. It all comes down to “digital hand-prints” – the data which is left over on the visited resource by the users computer, especially his Internet browser. When taken together, the information about users plugins, time zone, display settings, etc can form a unique profile which will lead back to the original user, even if his cookies were erased and the IP address changed. It is quite easy to see the possible practical applications of this, EFF states that advertisement companies have been using this methods of profiling for a long time now.