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If a person clears their cookies and changes their IP address, is there ANY way for a website to identify that computer as a computer that has “been here before”? In other words, no identifiable information like MAC can ever be known over HTTP, right? (I’ve looked through the list of headers and only see cookies and user-agent).
Also – same goes for a mobile device. If the mobile clears cookies, is there any way to identify it as a repeat visitor?
Thanks!
Chad
If you look at a site such as browserspy, you will see that a website can find out quite a bit more from a browser then the stuff you see just by looking at your request headers. And security researchers have done some investigation of the idea of uniquely identifying a browser based on those characteristics (e.g. what plugins you have installed, what fonts you have installed, etc.). But nothing like this is truly reliable (for one thing, much of this will change simply by switching to a different browser on the same computer). There is certainly no “official” unique identifier such as a MAC address.