Minimise your browser plugins

There are a lot of browser extensions and plug-ins supposedly protecting users against tracking:

• The presence or absence of plug-ins provides a large amount of information. NavigatorPlugins.plugins (JS) is still supported by some browsers. It returns a PluginArray object, listing the Plugin objects describing the plugins installed.

• A lot plug-ins themselves will happily provide websites with a large amount of identifying information about a user, including the list of installed fonts, CPU model and speed, IP addresses, username, hostname, etc. Plus plug-ins can also have their own data and cookie stores, that they allow websites to manipulate.

• Apparently it is even possible to use the NoScript plugin to gather information about what sites, or files, a user accessed while in a private browsing session and also whilst using the TOR browser.