How do you safely browse the Internet while protecting your identity? Advertisers hackers and malicious spyware are constantly trying to track which websites we visit our browsing habits and what we do on our computers.

How do we protect ourselves? We have been told to run anti-virus software anti-spyware software don鈥檛 run scripts don鈥檛 tick on links that you don鈥檛 trust. I think it would surprise most people no matter what you do it is almost impossible to hide your identity online.

Web browsers try and make you feel safe by private browsing mode. It is a feature that clears all your browsing history cache and cookies. These are the most common methods to track online activity.

Unfortunately these are not the only ways to track uniqueness to a system. System fonts location browser ID OS ID time zone ISP and many other pieces of information that are transmitted when using the Internet. This information can be used to create a matrix that can successfully create a digital fingerprint and identity you.

Panoptic is a project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that takes 17 bits of information and lets you examine if a unique digital fingerprint can be created from your computer. There had been over 430000 people that had tested their system against the Panotpic website before I tested my system. My web browser returned a unique fingerprint that identified my machine different from all of the other 430000 machines tested before mine.

Every time we install an application we change our system every time we add a browser extension we create a change to our computer. The combination of these and other actions creates something unique that can be observed and tracked. This sounds like the beginning to a science fiction movie doesn鈥檛 it?

You can try to run the test yourself. The Panotpic project can be found at: http://panopticlick.eff.org/