Following up on the controversy and buzz over Evercookie, a persistent cookie, Jacqui Cheng contacted Samy Kamkar, the developer. She reports, in part:
Sound evil? It is. But Kamkar—whose motto is “think bad, do good”—doesn’t seem all that evil. In fact, Kamkar told Ars that he wrote evercookie to raise user awareness about the ways in which companies can track them.
“I hope evercookie simply demonstrates to people what types of methods are being employed to track them and to decide whether or not they want to prevent those methods,” he said. “evercookie took less than a day to create for me as a security hobbyist, so I can only imagine the technology that funded developers are producing.”
Kamkar says he doesn’t actually use evercookie to track people—it exists largely as a proof of concept, and he’s not using technologies that are particularly bleeding edge in the developer world.
“None of these are new techniques,” he told Ars, “but an API like this is awesome at raising awareness.”
Read more on Ars Technica.