Achieving Anonymity Online Remains Difficult Despite Evolving Privacy Tools

Fun fact: Ghostery tells me, this article is framed by 67(!) trackers. Yes. Online anonymity is hard. One reason are morons who sell out their users to every tracking vendor with a little cash at hand.

The article refers to browser "fingerprinting" referred to in this EFF research: https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf Curious if browser companies are working to remove the traceability of their browsers (other than Google, of course).

The issue is more significant than just changing a simple browser user-agent string. To completely prevent fingerprinting, you must also eliminate all browser differences (e.g. vender prefixes). Additionally, remember that the lack of information can also be information.

Also keep in mind that it's quite difficult to prevent leaking of other information. An example: OS type can be determined from lower-level protocol information like TTL and window size.

Something I recently became aware of is that some sites (AT&T Wireless and HBOGo) know when you are using privacy mode. How are they doing this?

At the very least, they can detect that your browser isn't accepting cookies. They might interpret that as Privacy Mode.