Cover Your Tracks

Cover Your Tracks (coveryourtracks.eff.org), formerly Panopticlick, is a browser fingerprinting analysis tool created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that tests a browser's uniqueness by measuring dozens of fingerprinting characteristics and assessing how distinctive the combination is among all tested browsers.

For OSINT investigators, Cover Your Tracks is an operational security assessment tool for investigation browsers. Before using a browser for sensitive investigation, running Cover Your Tracks reveals whether the browser's fingerprint is unique — if it is, any website visited during investigation can potentially identify the browser across sessions even when VPNs, Tor, or cookie deletion is used.

Browser fingerprinting is a tracking technique that doesn't require cookies — it uses stable characteristics like User-Agent string, screen resolution, installed fonts, canvas rendering, WebGL implementation, audio context characteristics, and dozens of other signals to create a unique identifier. A browser with a distinctive fingerprint can be tracked across sessions even without any identifying information being explicitly shared.

For investigators who need to browse investigation targets without their browser being identified or tracked, Cover Your Tracks reveals which fingerprinting characteristics are making the browser distinctive, allowing targeted hardening. Browsers with strong tracker protection show lower uniqueness scores.

Tor Browser is specifically designed to present a standardized fingerprint to minimize uniqueness — Cover Your Tracks demonstrates this effectiveness by showing Tor Browser fingerprints as less distinctive than standard browsers.

Privacy-hardened browsers (Brave, Firefox with privacy settings, Chrome with fingerprinting protections) can significantly reduce fingerprint distinctiveness, though perfect fingerprint neutralization is difficult.

For operational security documentation, running Cover Your Tracks and recording the result demonstrates that the investigation browser was assessed for fingerprint protection before sensitive research began.

Document the browser configuration tested, the Cover Your Tracks assessment result (unique/not unique, tracking protection status), and the date of testing.