Browser is leaking your privacy.

You know Internet is not safe.
You know web sites using cookies to track your activities and get familiar with your habits.
Do you know even when you disable cookies, your browser is still submitting information that can be used to identify you?

Try this link (it won't harm your computer, I promise): http://nevil.tk/

This is an small example showing you what your browser is telling the server. In this page, you can see your IP address, User Agent of your browser and language setting of your OS.

So what can be seen from this negligible information? Well, all that is needed to identify you. 

First, your IP address can be used to see where you are from. If  http://nevil.tk/  is not obvious, try enter what you see on this page to http://www.geoiptool.com/. Is this map familiar to you?

Second, User Agent usually contains information of what browser you are using, and what is your Operating System. Browser type is basically right there in the string. For Windows OS, you can see "Windows NT version_number". Windows XP has version number 5.1, Vista and Windows 7 are 6.0 and 6.1 respectively.

Last but not least, languages. This is languages your browser likes, also language display settings on your OS. From this setting, one can tell whether you are Russian or probably American travelling in Russia.

Scared? Not so much! We can always protect our privacy. If you care about your privacy, TOR(The Onion Routing) is always a good choice. Download it at http://torproject.org/, it's free, it's open source, it's safe. With Tor, all your surfs seems to be from the same browser type, the same OS and random IP. The IP address may be from your neighbor, also can be from the other half of the earth. However either your neighbor or the guy on the other half of the earth can actually see who you are, because Tor not only encrypt your information, but also passes the information over several middle tor nodes before him/her. Tor is designed to protect your privacy, it is designed to be safer when more people using it. So give it a try.

That's it, thanks for reading. Happy surfing!