Even without cookies, popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox give web sites enough information to get a unique picture of their visitors about 94 percent of the time, according to research compiled over the past few months by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The research puts a quantitative assessment on something that security gurus have known about for years, said Peter Eckersley, the EFF senior staff technologist who did the research. He found that configuration information, data on the type of browser, operating system, plugins and even fonts installed can be compiled by websites to create a unique portrait of most visitors.

This means that most Internet users are a lot less anonymous than they believe, Eckersley said. "Even if you turn off cookies and you use a proxy to hide your IP address, you could still be tracked," he said. The data doesn't actually identify the web user, but it creates a unique browser "fingerprint," that can be used to identify the user when he visits other websites.

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