Sensor Characteristics Uniquely Identify Individual Phones

[wraggster]

SFGate reports that Stanford researchers have figured out a way to generate a unique fingerprint from a cell phone's suite of built-in sensors (http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/10/10/stanford-researchers-discover-alarming-method-for-phone-tracking-fingerprinting-through-sensor-flaws/). The tiny accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones, and speakers in cell phones have characteristics that vary slightly from handset to handset, and these variations may contain enough information to uniquely identify a given handset. How that information might get from the phone to a third party varies (the article describes a JavaScript snippet reading the Z-axis accelerometer, though it says little about how the user might block such information from being read), but the possibility for abuse is certainly troubling.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/10/11/1231240/sensor-characteristics-uniquely-identify-individual-phones