Slashdot Mirror
Nine Out of Ten of the Internet's Top Websites Are Leaking Your Data
merbs writes: The vast majority of websites you visit are sending your data to third-party sources, usually without your permission or knowledge. That's not exactly breaking news, but the sheer scale and ubiquity of that leakage might be. Tim Libert, a privacy researcher, has published new peer-reviewed research that sought to quantify all the "privacy compromising mechanisms" on the one million most popular websites worldwide. His conclusion? "Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware."
All reported on a site with links to Facebook Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and is most definitely using Google Analytics.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Are you so sure of that? Are you actually taking steps to stop it? Are you verifying it?
Right now on Slashdot as I type this, there are 12 external domains being referenced, 8 of which want to run scripts. All of them are ad or analytics companies.
A massive amount of sites have references to the big ad sites (usually multiple), as well as references and/or cookies to social media sites ... which means a lot of ad companies trivially track you across sites, know where you visit, how often, and the pages you're reading.
Unless you are actively blocking this crap, and unless you're looking at the sites which are being blocked and adding which you've missed ... and clearing any cookies and shit they've added as you go ... you should really assume that these sites are seeing your data even if you don't subscribe to them or realize you're interacting with them.
You have to be fairly aggressively blocking this shit to believe those companies aren't seeing some of your data.
And, quite frankly, if you are aggressively blocking this shit, your friends and family are probably tired of you ranting about how fucked up the internet is. I know mine are.
The problem is so many people don't know this, and even if you try to tell them they don't care.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.