[mwexler]

Look, there are tons of data available in the browser, see http://panopticlick.eff.org/ for a good example. But they are non-stable for reasons outside of the user's control. So, if a user wants to kill her cookies every day, cool, they can. They can't randomly change their useragent+screen-resolution on a daily basis with the same ease. In addition, UA changes outside of user's control (a browser update pushed on them, for example) and that breaks tracking they may want.

So, no, these workarounds are not the right answer; we need mechanisms that let users control their data and let them choose to share it. It's up to us as product makers to give them a good reason.

[jasomill]

Well, having made no special effort, the site claims my User-Agent is as unique as my set of 5,150 installed fonts. To be fair, I suppose WebKit nightly version numbers don't satisfy most definitions of "random".

As for mechanisms, to what end, if nobody bothers to use them? Especially things like "randomize User-Agent string" that'd break a great many "non-evil" sites?

[mwexler]

Looks like someone made a "randomize user-agent" for Chrome: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880536