Can websites personally identify visitors?

https://plus.google.com/u/1/106142598193409336347/posts/2jLJ5B4yPYF

by goatcurious • 14 years ago

173 107 14 years ago

plus.google.com

NiekvdMaas2• 14 years ago

Looking at the http://ubervu.com/ website, it seems they are using a tracking service hosted on http://trackalyzer.com/. This is a privately registered domain (there is no index page either), but from http://trackalyzer.com/w3c/policy1.xml we can derive that this service is operated by LeadLander.com.

The LeadLander product seems to identify users by company name (most likely by checking the IP address/netblock) and then "integrates" with LinkedIn and Jigsaw in order to contact (spam?) the users by email (see: http://www.leadlander.com/web_analytics.asp).

Definitely interesting, but legal? Not very likely...

Cieplak• 14 years ago

    f :: IPAddress -> [Maybe EmailAddress]

I am guessing that in order to get this function to work, the ad company would have a contract with a company such as LinkedIn or Twitter, who can perform this mapping, based on their server logs.

chm3• 14 years ago

Which would be quite vile.

VMG2• 14 years ago

IP address alone isn't sufficent, browser info is also needed

Evbn3• 14 years ago

That data is guaranteed to be public, per the rules governing the domain name registration system.

jnorthrop2• 14 years ago

> Definitely interesting, but legal? Not very likely...

There is nothing in the US that makes this sort of activity illegal. The exceptions would include minors, health or certain financial information. Excluding that, unless it goes against something stated in their policies it is perfectly legal in the US.

NiekvdMaas2• 14 years ago

The mapping part (IP/netblock --> email) might not be illegal in the USA, but I'm pretty sure that sending users unsolicited emails after visiting a website is.

bcoates• 14 years ago

Have the various spam-blockers of the world gotten more complacent? This seems like the sort of indiscriminate crawling that would get you both a lot of valid e-mail addresses and a permanent home in everyone's junk folder.

uptown3• 14 years ago

Online anonymity is pretty much gone. You can uniquely identify most visitors without cookies using a bunch of other exposed attributes.

This site shows you how unique your system appears: http://panopticlick.eff.org/

When you combine things like screen-resolution, installed fonts, etc. you get a pretty-unique profile of each person.

Bruce Schneier addresses the topic here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/tracking_your_...

How UberVu mapped this back to an actual email address is a separate matter - but I'm guessing they used the profile of his machine and connected it to a matching profile they had access to from some site he does authenticate with.

Now extend that concept to Google. They've got their digital hooks on millions of sites using Google Analytics. They can map those hits back to an IP address that correlates to a GMail login and get a pretty good idea about where else their users browse.

josephlord2• 14 years ago

Not to mention Facebook tracking you across the web with their Like buttons.

I try to do most of my browsing in a different browser from the one I log into FB/Google with.

Lucadg• 14 years ago

me too. Do you reckon this is enough?

jrajav• 14 years ago

If you use Chrome, there are extensions like this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-disconnec...

g-garron2• 14 years ago

Just because of that I have disabled fb like, twitter and g+ from my blog. I had also disabled google analytics but traffic started to go down. Today I have re-enabled analytics to see if that is the reason.

I did not have too much traffic from fb or twitter to think that is because I took their buttons out.

Anyway, I prefer to avoid those sites tracking my readers, savvy people can anyway share my content if they want.

So, if you want is http://www.garron.me :). Just kidding.

cookiecaper2• 14 years ago

You may be interested in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-bloc... , which stops your browser from reporting back to FB until you actually click a "Like" button.

alok-g2• 14 years ago

It it possible to block/fake list of fonts and/or browser add-ons from being sent to a website?

alok-g2• 14 years ago

While trying to find a browser add-on for the above, found that Facebook detects NoScript and adjusts links accordingly [1]. In other words, the list of add-ons is used proactively to try to bypass some of them.

[1] Excerpt: "Facebook seems to detect an active NoScript and replaces external links with tracked ones." from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-privac...

notatoad3• 14 years ago

The list of fonts is only available through flash, so if you get rid of flash (either permanently or with flashblock) that should cut down your fingerprint a bit.

zurn• 14 years ago

> You can uniquely identify most visitors without cookies using a bunch of other exposed attributes.

Yep, that's nasty, but this is much worse still: getting visitor names & email contact info.

notatoad3• 14 years ago

Panopticlick is a bunch of fearmongering nonsense. I'm on an ipad right now, and they tell me that "only one in 350000 browsers has the same fingerprint as mine". All fully-updated iPads have the exact same fingerprint, you can't even come close to uniquely identifying me with that.

cynwoody2• 14 years ago

Next time I visit the Apple Store, I should remember to visit Panopticlick from some of the machines on display and see what only-one-in numbers it reports.

tghw2• 14 years ago

You're forgetting localization. Your timezone alone makes you more identifiable. Add in your IP address and you're pretty identifiable. Not to mention that iPads don't really have any private browsing mode.

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

I'm confused as well, apparently my browser (stock firefox on Ubuntu) is completely unique. I would expect it to be reasonably rare but certainly not that rare.

I haven't done the math, but I have a feeling it just keeps dividing by the "one in x browsers have this value". Maybe it doesn't look at the intersections , for example: Using Totem as the default wmv player is rare and using Ubuntu is rare but reporting Totem as .wmv player is going to be a lot less rare amongst Ubuntu users that it is amongst Windows users.

adrianhoward• 14 years ago

Not disagreeing with the bogosity of the numbers - but isn't the time zone part of the fingerprint? So not all iPads are the same?

thwarted• 14 years ago

One in 350k means you are similar to ~1100 other Americans. A large crowd to be sure, but not great for being completely anonymous. There is still a lot of value in even making groups with this many members.

My previous comment on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4479876

bdcravens• 14 years ago

My iPhone 5 is 1 in 214,000; my Galaxy S3 was unique.

Since the iPhone 5 makes up more than one in 200,000 of the Internet's traffic, even that "relatively low" uniqueness is worrisome.

jameshart• 14 years ago

Panopticlick also glosses over the fact that the browser characteristics it uses for 'fingerprinting' change over time. In the time it took me to write this comment, Chrome updated itself three times, for example.

nathan_long• 14 years ago

I was just thinking earlier today, "I should turn on the Do Not Track header in Chrome." Then I thought, "...and become one of a very tiny group of people with that characteristic."

I'm going to do it anyway, though on principle. And I encourage all of you to do the same. ;)

disgruntledphd2• 14 years ago

I wouldn't bother, to be honest. Personally, given MS's stupid, stupid idea to turn it on by default in IE10, its just gonna be ignored (i actually asked our analytics vendor if we could record it so I could segment based on it).

The only way DNT will work is if its legally mandated, and I don't think that's gonna happen (though I could be wrong).

alexatkeplar• 14 years ago

We added Panopticlick-inspired user fingerprinting to SnowPlow recently - as far as we know, we're the first analytics package to make user fingerprinting generally available. If you're interested in the implementation, it's here:

https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/blob/master/1-trackers/...

I'm skeptical of its utility on its own - though when you add timezone, IP address and screen resolution, it may start to get mostly-unique.

Anyway we're waiting on some of out bigger users (millions of page views per day) to report back on its uniqueness - should be interesting...

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Way to make a name for yourself under the Be Evil brand--democratizing access to abusive user-hostile technology. It has the same feel as an open access community meth lab.

kijin• 14 years ago

> I did not ... connect with any of their social media properties

What do you mean by "connect"? Do you mean you didn't visit any of UberVu's social media pages, or that you didn't load any of the tracking-related assets that their website includes? Right now, Ghostery is reporting 5 tracking-related assets on their home page, including something called LeadLander. Click around a bit, and you might even come across assets that are loaded directly from a social media service that you use. Or maybe your browser willingly supplied personally identifiable information to them without telling you about it. Like auto-completing some fields in a hidden form, or automatically connecting to an identity provider that the website happens to support.

Every time I try Panopticlick [1], it tells me that my browser is unique among millions. I guess it means I'm leaving greasy fingerprints everywhere I go, even with AdBlock and Ghostery enabled, and even without logging in anywhere.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

pestaa• 14 years ago

I'd say using AdBlock and Ghostery greatly increases the chance you're uniquely identifiable, provided there is a client-side (perhaps non-Java) test to list the browser plugins you use.

At least that is the worst offender to my identity, revealing 21.29+ bits of information.

goodside• 14 years ago

Trying to strip all identifying bits from your browser is a fool's errand. Strictly speaking, all web users are uniquely identified by the combination of IP address and the timestamp of an HTTP GET. The only reason that's not practically an identifier is that web sites don't have access to the ISP logs necessary to resolve ('192.0.2.0', 'www.example.com', 1354989355) back to you. The question you should be asking is how likely it is that the specific website you're visiting, as opposed to a third-party partner, is snooping your Chrome plugins so it can later resolve your identity against the databases of other websites that you've explicitly visited, who also snoop such data themselves, so that both businesses could identify the extreme minority of users who go to this much trouble to protect their privacy. You're much better off with that risk vs. having dozens of third-party cookies hovering around you.

fotbr2• 14 years ago

Don't know how unique I am, but clicking the test button there causes (old, 3.x) Firefox to crash.

uptown3• 14 years ago

>(old, 3.x) Firefox

That should be unique enough... :)

paulgb• 14 years ago

It could be that they're taking advantage of a third-party service that he's signed up for. For example, Google Docs used to show a user's email when they clicked a link to a document that you created (it's anonymised now)

klearvue• 14 years ago

I've no idea if their service actually works but if it does, it's illegal in the EU and it would also be illegal for their clients to use such information to e-mail those visitors.

EDIT: talking about relead.com mentioned in a g+ reply.

huskyr• 14 years ago

That relead.com stuff seems pretty scary:

"Unmatched in quality and accuracy We can track exactly WHO is visiting your website, and how valuable or interested they are in your business"

"See complete company profiles of your visitors: Company Name, Industry, Size. We'll also be adding Credit Risk soon."

kawera• 14 years ago

And the animation in their home is pretty sinister too.

chm3• 14 years ago

Parent company:

http://draugiemgroup.com/en

kevindykes2• 14 years ago

As an American who built several web businesses before moving to Germany 4 years ago, I now shudder at what can be legally done in the US. There is no real perspective of data privacy at all. Now, I often feel that the German (and proposed new EU) standard goes way too far. But, I'm a fan of at least something that can keep such creepy behavior away from identifying users until they identify themselves.

mogrim• 14 years ago

When it comes to individual rights (as opposed to corporate) better it goes too far, than come up short.

subpixel• 14 years ago

Actually, it looks as if they stop short of personal identification, though they can achieve personal identification in some cases, depending on the size of the company, location of query vs location of key contacts, etc.

As I read their pitch, they identify the company a visitor to your site represents, and then they suggest the contacts at that company and give you a bunch of info about the company and the key staff.

martinced• 14 years ago

Is there a VM offering preconfigured browsers being identical for everybody? Same JavaScript settings, same (VM) screen resolution, same browser size... Make it fixed and use that VM only for browsing...

That would not prevent all types of tracking but it give people using panopticlick-like tracking techniques a few headaches...

andrewaylett• 14 years ago

The TOR browser bundle is probably the closest thing at the moment, but there probably aren't all that many people using it, at least compared to the Internet population at large.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

nwh4• 14 years ago

Go further with TAILs.

A virtual machine or USB boot disk that allows nothing to be written to disk, and destroys all the memory contents on shutdown. Oh, and all connections are forcefully proxied through TOR.

https://tails.boum.org/

selectout• 14 years ago

Quick privacy scan of their homepage only shows scripts being launched from 6 different companies and tracking cookies from optimizely and themself. (along with google analytics).

This actually has fewer than the average for tracking cookies placed on a homepage yet they are able to uniquely identify you. Privacy isn't gone on the web, but it is getting harder by the day. Some data can be passed outside of cookies and just through loading the scripts, but in general this site seems to be much ahead of average. (~10 unique domained scripts and ~7 unique domained cookies).

wiremine• 14 years ago

Reposting the paper referenced in the G+ thread:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

From the paper:

"By observing returning visitors, we estimate how rapidly browser fingerprints might change over time. In our sample, fingerprints changed quite rapidly, but even a simple heuristic was usually able to guess when a fingerprint was an 'upgraded' version of a previously observed browser's fingerprint, with 99.1% of guesses correct and a false positive rate of only 0.86%"

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

Title: "Can websites personally identify visitors?"

Links to: plus.google.com

That's hilarious.

throwaway125• 14 years ago

Reducing the uniqueness of a browser's fingerprint seems like a more valuable privacy investment than a DNT header that may or may not be adhered to by the websites you visit. Are any of the major web browsers actively working on this?

lumberjack• 14 years ago

There are add-ons and extensions available. To give an example I have an old firefox setup here with these add-ons: RefContol (forge referrer), UserAgentSwitcher (user agent manipulation), NoScript (block all scripting and therefore many tracking scripts), AdBlock (not sure is this helps to be honest), CookieMonster (easy cookie management), RequestPolicy (blocks request from your browser, helps with cross site scripting attacks; note this add-ons makes for a painful user experience unfortunately). Of course Java and Flash are disabled but if you don't want to disable them there are add-ons like BetterPrivacy for Flash that deal with them too. Note this setup is somewhat outdated and I have not kept up with recent developments. Finally all of this is useless if you don't also proxy your IP.

jasonkolb• 14 years ago

I don't think it's hard right now to get information on a visitor's company if they work somewhere large enough to have their own public IP block.

What I would love to know is how they take that and get an email address out of it. Which 3rd party are they working with that 1) had the IP -> email address link, or this guy logged in and 2) is willing to share that data with a 3rd party?

rebelde• 14 years ago

I've been told that, if you buy something online, some vendors sell your information (like email and postal addresses) tied to a 3rd party cookie on your browser.

Now, any site you visit that is able to check that 3rd party cookie knows all about you.

I don't know which 3rd parties do it, though.

forkrulassail• 14 years ago

TOR

https://www.torproject.org/index.html.en

VMG2• 14 years ago

Your browser still provides a pretty unique fingerprint.

nwh4• 14 years ago

Tor uses either an isolated browser or VM. You'd be moronic to use the same browser both in and outside of the onion router.

Ziomislaw• 14 years ago

you could use some privacy consious browser, like xombrero. for example: it has a feature to allow you to define a list of user-agents from which one is randomly selected on each request, allows you to use whitelist-mode in which you have to explictly allow cookies and js for each page.

antoncohen• 14 years ago

Does anyone know for sure that cookies or browser uniqueness were exploited to identify the visitor? I've used LeadLander, and as far as I can tell LeadLander and Relead both use reverse DNS to find what company the visitor is from. They track what pages the visitor goes to, and time spent (Google Analytics style). Plus "helpful" information like the company's location, and publicly available info about who works there.

That sort of information doesn't feel creepy to me, it's basically what you could do manually with info from the server logs and lots of searching (DNS, Google, LinkedIn).

If they are using information from another website where the user is logged-in to get the contact information it might be illegal, as it is likely that the first website's privacy policy doesn't say they are giving away that information. If company X uses LeadLander, and LeadLander gathers a user's email address from them, then gives that address to company Y when the same person visits, company X might be breaking the law because they are giving away personal information without stating it in their privacy policy. And privacy policies are required by California law.

seestheday• 14 years ago

I run analytics for a major enterprise and have had this technology pitched to me for years. It is a very common practice for B2B lead gen.

That said, don't believe the sales copy on their websites. They will tell you that they can reliably identify the individual, but that is horseshit.

They usually maintain and/or purchase access to lists of people who work at companies and have relevant job titles. The lists are captured from multiple sources ranging from stuff pubically posted on company websites to business cards collected (and sold) at trade shows/conferences. There are lots of other sources and I'm sure this audience can think of many on their own.

Comapny/ip/id can be gleaned from either an ip block or someone who registered to download a free report or other content from a partner site at some prior time.

Sure you'll sometimes get the contact for the exact person that browsed the site, but you'll often get it wrong. That said, it could still be valuable to contact someone at the company about your services, because if one person is looking into it, then someone else might be interested too.

The tech/idea certainly isn't new - I've been getting pitched it for 5+ years.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Apparently, yes:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/08/anonymous-tracking-now-inc...

dholowiski• 14 years ago

As an operator of a large web site, I was once pitched a product like this. Basically it used various sources to gather as much personally identifying information as possible from your visitors, right down to name, email address, address and phone number (where possible.

Super creepy, chewed the sales person out and told them to go away. But this is a thing.

steve8918• 14 years ago

This is pretty scary. Is there a web page I could go to that would identify what information they have about me?

uptown3• 14 years ago

UberVU Response:

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to link directly to a specific reply in Google+, but here's the reply from UberVU:

"Elisabeth Michaud Hi Sumit - Elisabeth from uberVU here (I also run the uberVU twitter account where we were chatting earlier). Niek is right that we have been using a tool called LeadLander (based in San Francisco) to help us connect with companies who visit our site. We take privacy very seriously and definitely don't want visitors to our site to feel we are overstepping our boundaries. As such, we've decided as a team to discontinue our use of LeadLander and focus our efforts on other ways to engage website visitors. You won't see any further emails from us, and these changes will be implemented globally.

If you have any further concerns, don't hesitate to reach out to me at <redacted>"

fudged71• 14 years ago

For those curious: http://www.leadlander.com/web_analytics.asp

mwill• 14 years ago

Wow that seems like a pretty sweeping change from a post and thread on G+. I'm wondering of they were seeing much value from those kinds of emails?

It seemed like it would be effective overall, considering their product and audience, so I'm surprised they backed away from it so quickly.

ubojan• 14 years ago

Can we share tips for "feeding" a browser with fake data and keeping some level of anonymity? For example, I noticed that one of the factors for Panopticlick is time zone. This is easily faked with changing a time zone on your computer and then starting a browser. You can fake IP address with anonymous proxies and change user agent in browser settings. Is there a way to change/fake plugin and fonts list as these are worst offenders regarding fingerprinting?

vonuebelgarten• 14 years ago

Seems an interesting idea for a Firefox add-on. Also, randomizing part of the user agent for each domain should be nice too.

97-109-107• 14 years ago

Yes, there are too small projects that I know about for Firefox: Firegloves https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firegloves/ Blender https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blender-1/?sr...

desbest• 14 years ago

I can identify the name and address of at least 50% of the people who use my websites.

netdog• 14 years ago

There was a time, in the not-too distant past, when the Internet was mostly about sharing educational information.

Sadly, the Internet is now full of companies who want to use it as a vehicle for advertising and who are obsessed with building up a dossier on as many people as possible, to exploit for financial gain. Your privacy means nothing to these companies; they will collect as much information about you as possible, with no regard for your wishes.

I take active countermeasures against these hostiles. I browse with javascript disabled. I don't have flash installed. I don't accept cookies blindly. I adjust my user agent. I run my own DNS server and cache and have hundreds of sites blackholed, including facebook, google analytics, and all the major ad servers.

It's some trouble to set all this up, and inconvenient at times. But unfortunately it's a jungle out there, and the default setup of browsers leaves you like a naked person in a mosquito-infested swamp.

mylittlepony3• 14 years ago

I don't think they are using browser uniqueness. I mean where would they get the fingerprint/email pairs from?

Everyone should use Firefox and install/do these:

- BetterPrivacy (removes supercookies)

- RefControl (to stop sending http referrers)

- User Agent Switcher (just in case)

- HTTPS-Everywhere

- Disable third party cookies in Preferences > Privacy

- Use a VPN

- Change Google for StartPage

- Use fake accounts (eg: youtube) and emails (dispostable.com) whenever possible. This is very easy if you have a password manager like LastPass, you don't have to remember many passwords.

With all this, you can surf the web quite safely, unless someone with your ID is creating a shared database of fingerprint/ID pairs. In that case you will also have to remove all your other plugins or use NoScript.

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

This is good advice, but I would ad Request Policy (if using Firefox) or Ghostery (if using Chrome; I would also suggest using Chromium instead of Chrome). I believe NoScript is also a must, but it does take some work to whitelist the sites you trust.

It took me a half hour to explain how to use NoScript to a non-technical person the other day. This stuff is not intuitive, and it will take time to educate our friends and family. Now that Facebook has made it acceptable for normal folks to be social on the web, we must be persistent in teaching these people to protect themselves.

mylittlepony3• 14 years ago

Wow, I didn't know about Ghostery and Request Policy. Been testing them and they are awesome, thanks a lot!

datamaze• 14 years ago

Does anyone know where they are buying these data sets that link browser characteristics to personally identifiable information? Obviously, companies like Linkedin and Facebook have these data sets but I can't imagine them selling that information.

Can websites personally identify visitors?

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