The good folks at EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have a cool research project on digital privacy: Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able
to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies.
Panopticlick <http://panopticlick.eff.org/> tests your browser to see how
unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. Click below and you will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.
Reminds me of a question asked in a presentation in a conference on computing and its tremendous impact on human life: - Can we recognize fundamental patterns of human behavior from raw *digital traces <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_traces>*? (Jon Kleinberg video at http://bit.ly/7dbuXm) Kleinberg describes an experiment they conducted using geo-tagged images from Flickr: they placed those images on a blank digital canvas, using latlong as co-ordinates on the canvas. A million or so images later, the images traced a map of the US (complete with canonical images for famous landmarks). All this without human intervention in placement, or annotation, of the maps. Very very very cool. I think the companies that will set themselves apart are the ones who harness the power of all these "human sensors" (passive crowdsourcing<http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2009/11/05/trend-stealth-crowdsourcing/> ). Why ask someone an explicit question if their body language, and related signals, says it all? Saidi