myopic1
Regular Member
- Mar 24, 2014
- 408
- 409
Okay just to clear up what someone else said, a website can NOT see your MAC address, ever. Unless someone is on your actual home network, it's invisible to the outside world.
Let's suppose you've done everything correctly, flash cookies, history, all browser content and changed your IP address then to 99.99% of sites, you're a different user. Now there are methods of fingerprinting a computer that don't involve the above, the only website I've seen thus far check other the other things that I'm about to mention is Facebook when it logs the device your using and your location in its security settings.
So your user agent/browser header is the most obvious way of tracking you. Your user agent is not unique like your IP addresses (1 in every 294539 people have my user agent) but when used in conjunction with things like, system fonts, time-zone, browser resolution and installed plugins (all of which are publicly visible to websites that you visit) you soon get a unique fingerprint. All of these things together make it around a 1 in several million people chance that it's you. So that's how it can be done.
To see what I mean in action, Google panopticlick and test your system. This can be beaten but it depends on how much time you have and how much you can be bothered.
Let's suppose you've done everything correctly, flash cookies, history, all browser content and changed your IP address then to 99.99% of sites, you're a different user. Now there are methods of fingerprinting a computer that don't involve the above, the only website I've seen thus far check other the other things that I'm about to mention is Facebook when it logs the device your using and your location in its security settings.
So your user agent/browser header is the most obvious way of tracking you. Your user agent is not unique like your IP addresses (1 in every 294539 people have my user agent) but when used in conjunction with things like, system fonts, time-zone, browser resolution and installed plugins (all of which are publicly visible to websites that you visit) you soon get a unique fingerprint. All of these things together make it around a 1 in several million people chance that it's you. So that's how it can be done.
To see what I mean in action, Google panopticlick and test your system. This can be beaten but it depends on how much time you have and how much you can be bothered.