Security → 1-million-site measurement and analysis of web privacy

 
The Princeton Web Census: a 1-million-site measurement and analysis of web privacy
»freedom-to-tinker.com/bl ··· privacy/

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...One of our more surprising findings was the discovery of two apparent attempts to use the HTML5 Audio API for fingerprinting. ... [see article for the figure] ... The figure is a visualization of the audio processing executed on users' browsers by third-party fingerprinting scripts. ...

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ZDnet has a little more on this. »www.zdnet.com/article/th ··· low-you/ Doesn't say how to protect one's self from it. Good news is public outrage has changed how it's used to some degree. So maybe outing sites that do this might be a long term solution.

 
The online advertisers are turning what used to be a good Web experience into an experience akin to running the gauntlet.

Most (if not all) of the HTML5 potentially track-able values illustrated in the sample web page are inhibited by simply not enabling scripting for the site (and/or for any iframe sub-sites). A Mozilla based browser with NoScript handles that quite well.

If a particular site has HTML5 content that you actually want to hear/view, then you just enable scripting for that content if it will not play without scripting enabled. And just as with enabling Adobe Flash for multimedia content, you just have to accept that one way or another, you are going to pay for that content.

FWIW, I use NoScript and I have Flash setup as "click to play". Any multimedia content I wish to hear/see is only a mouse click away, and the miscellaneous crap from advertisers is either a blank spot on the screen, or a "click to play" placeholder. I accept that if I chose to hear/watch that content, I will either have to pay a subscription fee, or give the sponsor a click-through credit.

Nice catch. You're right, blocking scripts should take care of it for now. I should be ok. No scripting, plugins, etc. runs without my permission. No 3rd party cookies and a hosts file should help too. It's like everyday seems like there's a new thing to watch out for.

Yep, but I have found that even my out of date* SeaMonkey browser and its out of date* NoScript add-on combined with blocking 3rd party cookies and accepting only session cookies for sites that I use that require accepting cookies takes care of most of the new crap with minimal additional effort by me.

* If it ain't broke...don't fix it!