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Privacy Leak in Mozilla and Mozilla-Based Browsers

Posted by timothy on from the where-are-you-going-where-have-you-been dept.

Mike S. writes "Mozillazine has pointed users to this story at ZDNet UK which breaks the news about a privacy bug discovered in in all Mozilla builds up to and including 1.2a as well as browsers based on Mozilla such as Netscape 6/7, Chimera and Galeon. The bug allows a web site to track where you're going when leaving the site whether you use a link, a bookmark or type a URL into the address field. This page has a demonstration of the bug and instructions on patching it via a user.js file."

1 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The most disturbing thing about this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > This just troubles me greatly.

    Fine, this is not how you'd expect it to work.

    But, GIVE ME A BREAK. Privacy issues on the Web are legend. Cookies, refer, hidden fields, the entire body of software we know as "IE", the list goes on and on and on.

    So, by some new "stupid browser trick" you can now see where people are going -- not just where they've come from (as has always, forever, been the case).

    Oh my.

    If you are worried about "privacy" then you have been using an appropriate "junk busting" proxy from day one.

    If you are not using such a proxy, then you are not now, and never have been, seriously worried about privacy. And, this "horror of horrors" is no more an issue to anyone than the Referrer field.

    This sounds more like Microsoft Marketing pouring though a Bug Base and using the media to turn a mole hill into a mountain.

    Should it be fixed? Yea. So should Referrer be removed from existence. So should alot of much more pressing privacy issues be outright abolished.

    So go back to sleep. If you weren't worried about this yesterday, then there is no reason for you to be worried about it today.