uh, can't you just use one of these?

@Tim Chen: thanks! might want to make it a bit more visible from some nav menu somewhere or something - i looked around but couldn't find them earlier. regardless, thanks for the response!

@vrillusions: the benefits i'm looking for are being able to give my kids cc's for itunes and the like, but to have nice, strict limits on them, and no liabilities if the cc company somehow screws up and allows more charges than authorized.

@swc oxcart: nice thoughts.

would be nice if they covered pre-paid credit cards too.

virtualizing a browser still lets them track you via IP address or fingerprinting. I've been evangelizing my solution-of-choice for a little while now: CsFire [albosure.blogspot.com] in combination with other privacy FF add-ons [albosure.blogspot.com]

@jbarr: Yeah, I've tried both of those. PDF Download doesn't solve my problems, and I don't really like using google's "quickview" viewer. but thanks for the tips anyway!

my biggest peeve with pdf readers is the difficulty of integrating them properly with firefox. I never seem to be able to get pdf's to open how i want them to - in a tab, in an external viewer, etc (i've had endless problems with foxit in this regard). This is probably more of FF's issue than the pdf reader itself -…

@YosefLevi: and your last point is an interesting one because it raises the idea of game theory. If my neighbors have invisible alarms, then I don't need one. But every neighbor is thinking that, etc.

@salient1: If you read the paper, you'll see that the method uses fonts installed in flash and java to fingerprint. Thus, if you and i both just had java installed on the exact same browser, we would still show different fingerprints due to different fonts being installed, or the order in which they are reported.

@Buster Friendly: Exactly. Security should be appropriate to the resource secured. I was flabbergasted when the Lenovo and Endnote forums kicked out my password because it didn't meet their security standards. Ugh. (It makes sense, given the suspect quality of software coming out of those places).

hmm - it's kinda lame. a good idea, but hasn't reached critical mass yet, imho.

@saicode: i'm imagine there's some performance hit, but i haven't run any tests to see. Just don't load up adblock plus with tons of different filters - that can set you back.

@saicode: Absolutely - I use a number of privacy add-ons together (cookiepal and csfire being a couple of them). I've outlined a suite of interesting add-ons on my blog here, most of which I run side-by-side: [albosure.blogspot.com]

@saicode: totally different. cookie culler gets rid of cookies. CsFire rejects 3rd-party cookies and/or content, even if you've allowed cookies for a site. For example, you can allow google cookies, but still reject them as you go around the web as website include google references in their pages.

Facebook isn't the only risk here! Google et al are busily tracking you around the web as well. And there are others that we don't normally think of too. There is an FF add-on called CsFire [addons.mozilla.org] that will block all 3rd party cookies, and all 3rd party content if you want it to. Blocking 3rd party…

@Fekdep & @andrew: It's not the fact of your allowing cookies or not that makes you unique. It's the cookie the site writes to your browser that does. Ok - if you have a cookie manager set to delete cookies quickly after they're set, then maybe that's better than not allowing cookies in the first place.

@TheLouis: uninstall all plugins? at least uninstall flash and java. but that kinda blows. i think the point is that there really isn't a fix for this out there yet, but there should be.

@Fekdep: why odd? unique = identifiable, and identifiable is bad. cookies make you unique.

one thing the article doesn't mention is the benefits of blocking 3rd party content, especially for known bad actors (such as google, facebook, etc). Fingerprinting don't mean sh*t if you never ping the site in the first place.