Slashdot Mirror
Sites Guilty of Hijacking History
Gunkerty Jeb writes "A recent study launched by the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science to determine the scope of privacy-violating information flows at popular websites shows that popular Web 2.0 applications such as mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are teeming with various kinds of privacy-violating flows. Ultimately the researchers determined that such attacks are not being adequately defended against."
So they inspect the top 50,000 sites and 485 have some level of inferring browser history data? I'm not so sure I see the abundance noted in the summary. Less than one percent is teeming? And only one of those sites is ranked in the top 100 by Alexa?
I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about this or we should ignore it but come on.
Just face it, websites often operate on razor thin margins. They live and die by the clicking of advertisements on their pages. Now they've found a way to sell private information that could be mildly useful to the right bidder. And it turns out it mostly adult websites that stream video doing this. You might have cause for being upset but anyone familiar with business models of seedy websites should not be surprised.
I have always used Google Chrome's incognito browser when I go to seedy sites. It's simply not going to be a priority for the masses but for people who are annoyed or angry, it's the best way to deal with this sort of thing. If some major non-adult site were doing this, I think they would be setting themselves up for embarrassment, I'm glad somebody's doing these checks.
My work here is dung.
Back in the dark ages (1997 or so), there was a school of thought that advocated cookie poisoning, not just removal. Anybody know of any firefox plugins that actively randomize your history or cookies? Throwing wrenches into databases is the next best thing to naming your kid Little Bobby Tables.