Taken. Info You Give Away All The Time

Visit https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken and it will tell you all the info that your web browser silently passes back to it.

A simple trick but very effective - report back to the user what the browser (Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, Safari, Firefox etc) has just told the web server. Every page on the Web collects this information, all the time, and they rarely tell you. To be fair much of it is for technical reasons, how to supply the images, what language to set the page etc ... but of course it's not just for that.

This is what taken. just told me - see, it knew I had left that page to type this in ...

Where you are

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

You appear to be in Melbourne, Australia. Your internet provider is Netskope Inc. We know this because your IP address — 163.xxx.xxx.43 — was the first thing your device sent us. We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice. We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.

When you arrived

09:37 · Australia, Darwin

It is in the morning where you are. Your device reported your timezone before the page finished loading. A website knowing your local time can infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep. Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own.

What you brought with you

Chrome · Windows · 1536×864 @ 1x · 32-bit color

You are reading this on a computer running Windows. Your browser is Chrome. Your screen is 1536 by 864 pixels. Your screen accepts 10 simultaneous touch points. Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that.

What renders your world

Intel(R) UHD Graphics 730 (0x00004692) Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0

Your graphics processor identified itself as Intel(R) UHD Graphics 730 (0x00004692) Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0. This tells us the manufacturer, the generation, and roughly the price of your machine. Combined with your screen size and font list, this string alone can distinguish your device from most others on the internet. The technique is called WebGL fingerprinting. No permission is required.

How much is left

Battery: 100% · charging

Your device reports 100%, charging — which is also what no-battery-at-all looks like to a webpage. We cannot tell whether you are a laptop on full charge or a desktop without a battery, and neither can any other site. The two are indistinguishable from this side. In 2015, researchers demonstrated that battery level — combined with discharge time — was unique enough to track users across websites for up to thirty minutes. Your exact percentage, right now, is a fingerprint. Firefox removed this API in 2016. Your browser still exposes it.

What you speak

English

Your browser’s primary language is English. This is transmitted in the header of every HTTP request. It has been doing this for as long as you have used this browser.

What you carry

Georgia · Courier New · Comic Sans MS · Impact · Trebuchet MS · Garamond · Verdana · Tahoma · Lucida Console · Cambria

Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. On desktop, the specific combination of fonts is often nearly unique — fonts accumulate over time, with apps and OS updates, and the resulting set becomes a fingerprint made of letters. Advertising networks combine this with your screen size, language, timezone, and GPU to identify devices across websites. Without cookies. Without accounts. Without a name. The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal in most jurisdictions. It is happening on most pages you visit. None of them mention it.

What you allow

Cookies: enabled · Light mode · 0 MB stored by others

Your browser accepts cookies. Websites can write small files to your device that persist after you leave — files that identify you when you return, that follow you across sites, that remember what you looked at, what you almost bought, and how long you hesitated. We have not written one. Your browser would let this page write up to 10 GB to your device — a private room, ours alone, like the one given to every site you visit. We left it empty. Most pages don't. You prefer light interfaces — your operating system told us. You have not enabled Do Not Track. This is the default. It means either that you chose not to, that you did not know it existed, or that you know it makes no difference. All three possibilities are informative. This page stores nothing on your device. When you close this tab, it forgets you exist.

Where you were before

www.instapaper.com

You came here from www.instapaper.com. Your browser told us the address of the page you were reading before this one. Every link you follow tells the destination where you were. The page you just left knows you left. This page knows where you came from. Neither was asked.

You left

0.0 seconds away

You just switched to another tab — or another app — and came back 0.0 seconds later. The Visibility API named the exact moment you left and the exact moment you returned. Every website you open can read this signal. Most advertising platforms use it to calculate whether you are actually seeing their ads, or just leaving them open in a background tab. Your attention is a commodity. We just watched it leave the room.

The question is, did your web browsers that you're using right now do the same on this page ... yes, yes it did. Some of the information will be used to show the page properly, but some of it is fed into Blogger statistics (how do you think the "Popular Posts" below this is generated) and Google Analytics - it's how I know that Lanzhou / 兰州的各位好 visitors pop in now and again

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