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 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:
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).
Why ask someone an explicit question if their body language, and related signals, says it all?
Saidi