Chrome extension to randomize your User Agent (Underpants)
github.com
github.com
1) Track data while at work. Display only at work. 2) Track data while at work. Display at home and work. 3) Track data at home and work. Display at work 4) Don't track data at all.
Of course there's a few cases I missed but from what you said I don't see the reason they'd track me at home and display at work or any other various combinations excluded.
If I understand your question correctly, the answer would be 1. In most cases, they're doing cookie based tracking and you wouldn't have any crossover unless it was site specific retargetting and you've logged into an account on both platforms. If there's any crossover, its because you have the same browsing behaviors on both platforms.
Interesting, thank you for the information.
(Yes, yes, people shouldn't use UA sniffing to do that... but they do.)
The useragent is much too random, though. As explained quite nicely on the eff page, it defeats the purpose. You've managed to uniquely identify yourself as someone with a very random-looking useragent.
I was more thinking along the lines of sending random "genuine" user-agents (combinations of various versions of Chrome/Firefox/Safari on various OS). And with some more clever way to make sure the cookies match, or fixing the user-agent is a bit useless..
According to Panopticlick, the biggest leaks of identifying information are the list of fonts and the plugin information string, neither of which seem to be guarded against by any existing tool except NoScript, though disabling Flash might help. However, even using NoScript, your information would still probably leak to whatever popular site is in your whitelist (e.g. Google or Facebook).
Unless someone hacks Flash to always sort the font lists and finds a way to fix the plugin list leak, one way to get rid of many of these leaks is to build a locked-down virtual machine containing a fixed set of fonts, a fixed screen resolution, UTC timezone, and possibly a fixed browser together with only the en-us locale to minimise HTTP_ACCEPT information leaks (which I presume to be the most popular one). Assuming the filesystem remains mostly untouched, the font list should always be in the same order for all instances of the VM. It might not be necessary to use any specific browser, but I presume there are many possible ways to identify a browser and perhaps even its exact version from its behaviour even without using the user agent.
Even after fixing all of the leaks identified by Panopticlick, the behaviour of the user could still be used for identification, perhaps by leaks caused by the user or by bugs and inadequacies in the "anonymisation suite". To pre-emptively counter this, an orthogonal approach like the one suggested by obituary_latte could be used (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880822). Such a "random browser" might need to be active most of the day to minimise timezone leakage, though that might not be very practical, or even necessarily a concern for many.
Finally, a yet another thing that might help would be to use popular VPN services which would presumably reduce the amount of information leaked by your IP address.
Alas, programming is hard.
I don't know what it is--perhaps my get off my lawn mentality--but I am terrified of not owning my anonymity. Though obviously not scared enough to stop using these services...
randomly browse to 4chan
randomly click on link
randomly have FBI raid your house a few weeks later
I like the concept, but it's not something I would run personally unless there were a lot of checks in place.
Yes, would certainly be needing of some checks. Perhaps a dictionary of acceptable link-words that would be OK to "click". Maybe also a blacklist of "never-click" words and/or domains/netblocks.
Or even perhaps a whitelist of a few domains that are OK. Chances are slim that Time.com or USAtoday or CNN links would lead to trouble and the collection of "safe" links would grow exponentially with only a handful of "safe" domains.
As an aside, I think you should name it CoverAlls.
EDIT: I guess I worded that a bit harshly. Underpants is meant to be a PoC for a tactic that may work in some situations, but the feeling I got is that people are taking it to be a lot more serious than it is.