I regularly read the excellent arstechnica articles but I've missed the one related here, particularly interesting. So... when friends tell me I'm excessively zealous with privacy concerns, reading the arstechnica article makes me believe that I'm certainly not over the truth but still under : trackers will invent the unimaginable to discover everything they possibly can. On us.
Interesting. It looks like everything can be used to track users... Anybody concerned about this tracking method should probably type everything in notepad and then copy-paste it in browser. OTOH site could track him as an only user using copy paste to input data
The method is not new, but it works only if the site is monitoring your key strokes (see Google Search Autocomplete where a script sends the each of the new key you entered in the search box and not the whole string at the end).
It's my belief that high levels of anonymity cannot be achieved even with Tor, if you're looking at interactive sessions (such as browsers). You're vulnerable to too many complexities in the browser, demands for low latency, and keystroke profiling as described here. I guess the plugin helps or stopping javascript, but there are really too many gotchas in the hugely complex popular browsers. Message passing systems are far better in that the keystroke profile cannot be obtained (you are running the program locally, the browser cannot impose that on you). Plus you do not need low latency. An interesting similar type of profiling lies in the content people type:- I read a book called the secret life of pronouns, and apparently the way in which we use those somewhat invisible decorations to language are fairly individual, and could at least be part of a profile. They have been used to attempt to provenance historical works whose authorship is disputed. Also, there are some favorite unusual words that people may individually be fond of, and that can also point the finger at them. And I bet the spooks are looking at that.
New Chrome extension helps combat keyboard biometric profiling https://threatpost.com/new-chrome-extension-helps-combat-keyboard-biometric-profiling
