A study entitled “Browsing behavior exposes identities on the web” (also cited by Biometric Update) offers an informative view of how “something you do” can identify you when combined with other things you do.
“Though most users are unique in their four most-visited domains, we find that we often need fewer data points for user identification. To determine how many domains are needed to pinpoint a user, we examine fingerprints at the individual level. For each unique user i, we randomly select a domain from their fingerprint and group all unique users who have that domain in their fingerprints (see Methods). Then, we select another most-visited domain from user i and narrow our group to those with both domains (Fig. 1c). We repeat this step, incrementally adding domains, until we isolate user i. At this point, we have a set of domains which exists only within user i’s fingerprint. Our analysis shows that we need an average of 2.45 steps to identify a unique user within the data set (Fig. 1d). This finding indicates that although four domains guarantee uniqueness, users’ distinct online habits facilitate their identification with fewer domains.”
Think about the four domains that YOU visit the most. If you don’t know what they are, Chrome users can visit chrome://site-engagement/ and order the list. I can almost guarantee that one of my four most-visited websites is NOT one of yours.
And as for my wildebeest friend…
Bredemarket 