There is little point in hiding behind a VPN if you are rated by your web browser out.

At first glance the metadata retention laws in Australia appear not difficult when browsing the internet to avoid. Only participate your virtual private network and you are protected from prying eyes by a magic cloak which conceals your actions. Seems easy, but the pursuit for internet anonymity isn’t too clear-cut.

Rather than monitor everybody’s browser history they will monitor suspect sites work back to locate us and then to see who is seen. This mass surveillance is still considered by many people, others do not.

Most consumer-level broadband connections issue your house a fresh IP address each single time you reboot your broadband modem, and that’s the reason why the system needs ISPs to keep this information for a couple of years, to allow them to decide who was using a particular IP address at just about any specified time. Of course identifying the account holder is not always the same as identifying the perpetrator, but it is clearly a powerful lead.

By using a VPN, proxy server or proxy chain to hide the IP address in theory you’ll be able to avoid the metadata retention scheme.

It is vital that you realise your IP address is not the digital fingerprint that you leave behind on the web, although this may be sufficient to safeguard your privacy in certain situation. Considerably harder to conceal is the fingerprint made by your , which stays intact regardless of how you conceal your web traffic.

This may not look too incriminating, but the site may also analyze other details of your personal computer like system fonts and your browser plugins to develop a more different profile. As an example, based on browser fingerprint research site Panopticlick, my browser fingerprint is unique among the 5.2 million analyzed so far. That means that you also know for sure the first one was me, and if that precise browser fingerprint is recorded by two distinct sites, there is a fairly good opportunity the second one was additionally me. This really isn’t merely applied, many sites use browser fingerprinting to identify groups and users like Electronic Frontier Foundation view it as a privacy risk that is significant.

True browser fingerprints are evidence that is circumstantial, nevertheless they are an excellent starting point. That is before you allow for HTML5 sailcloth fingerprinting, which can assess even more aspects of your personal computer to narrow it down even farther, for monitoring individuals online, alongside other tricks. Your odds of staying anonymous online all depend on who you are concealing from and what you are concealing.

All these web browser features fall under the classic definition of metadata. They are not the contents of your on-line actions, only info regarding your actions – the info written on the outside of Brandis’ envelope that is metaphorical. Should Australia’s metadata retention system eventually expand to include a browser fingerprint register, even only for “individuals of interest”, it may provide the capacity to cross reference fingerprints to help track down those who hide behind a VPN.

The idea is really straightforward. See Facebook with your VPN disabled, then make use of the exact same browser to go to with The Pirate Bay with your VPN empowered.

Your visit would be turned up by a database search to Facebook – it’d narrow the search down to a handful of suspects, in case your browser fingerprint is not unique.

For this particular trick to work, intelligence agencies and law enforcement would require a method to embed browser fingerprint tracking on third party sites. In the event you have been reading the news recently then it is naive to believe that they could not pull away this. True they are prone to use such tools to capture terrorists than file sharers, but after such a system was in place it will not be closed to scope creep.