Latest data point: No matter what you do to stay anonymous, there’s a good chance your Web browser is betraying your identity, by leaving a unique fingerprint every time you visit a site.

A study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 84 percent of browsers leave a unique marker, via different combinations of settings and configurations. That percentage moves up to 94 percent if your browser uses plug-ins for Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash and Oracle’s (ORCL) Java.

What to do about it? There’s not a lot an individual user can do, the EFF says. But it says these kinds of broswers tend to be less identifiable than others:

• Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
• Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements
• Mobile devices like Google’s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone (the study was conducted in January and February, before the iPad hit the market)
• Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another

So if you’re the kind of person who only browses the Web via your smartphone, perhaps you’ll be okay. Otherwise, “the best solution for web users may be to insist that new privacy protections be built into the browsers themselves,” the EFF suggests.

Or, failing that, accept that absolute privacy–the kind where no one has any ability whatsoever to track your actions–may be unattainable on the Web. The real solution may not be a technical one, but a social one, whereby we come to a rough agreement about what we’re okay sharing and what we really, really need to keep to ourselves. That could take a while.

According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.”

Behavioral advertising, in particular, has come under fire by privacy groups. Earlier this month, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and other related organizations called for stronger rules limiting what kinds of personal information are collected by marketers and how long they can hold on them.

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But after making an initial concession earlier this year, Google (GOOG) and the White House are going further. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains: “Ordinarily, YouTube maintains a record of every YouTube video you’ve ever viewed, associated with your YouTube account, through use of the YouTube cookie. Now, they’ve agreed to exempt videos embedded on Whitehouse.gov from this logging.”

Will that be good enough to satisfy hard-to-please critics like the EFF? Amazingly, it does! Though of course, they’d like to see more. Here’s Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s legal director:

This is a good step and we commend YouTube and the Government for taking it. It shows that they recognize that tracking the government videos that Americans view is creepy and wrong. It also shows that Google/YouTube technologists can build and offer clever, useful privacy-protective modifications to their standard software.

Now we’d like to see them turn that cleverness to other places, not just the White House. Google/YouTube should offer this same “tracking-free” viewing to others. Human rights videos, politically sensitive videos, or even ordinary videos where viewers may want privacy should all be available without tracking…

In addition, the government should adopt “tracking-free” videos across the board for all government websites. Viewers of videos from the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, your member of Congress and other governmental entities deserve the same privacy protection that viewers of the President’s speeches.

The IRS has videos? Who knew? In the meantime, feel free to watch clips like this one, of Obama’s April victory over the UConn women’s basketball team in a game of “P-I-G” without worrying that the government is watching you watch.