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by wtallis 5223 days ago
Why is it implausible that either of those systems has a unique fingerprint among all those that have run the Panopticlick tool?
1 comments

Because that means that nobody with a stock chromebook and nobody with a stock laptop from my employer (of which there are many, let's put it that way) has ever visited the panopticlick site.

But just because, I tried two more chromebooks (same model), both in guest mode, both stock configuration - and they're both flagged as "unique" too.

Maybe I'm just a victim of a really long update cycle of their database.

(Addendum: I went back with my original laptop, all cookies cleared, and it's indeed not considered unique any more. So maybe I really just saw some lag in updating their DB)

(Addendum 2: Just to clarify, I never doubted that you can be uniquely identified. But the "unique" part was wrong for my sample. )

Even if you have the same system fonts and plugins installed, the order in which they are reported may be stable on one system but differ on another (due to filesystem inode layout). The EFF's Panopticlick FAQ [1] suggests that Flash and Java plugins should alphabetize the font lists reported from their APIs to reduce variation.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/faq.php