Easy to expose web surfers' habits, say researchers

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From the «well: that's new» department:
Title: It Is Easy To Expose Users' Secret Web Habits, Say Researchers
Author: help@slashdot.org
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2017 13:00:00 -0400
Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/oumFN2mayVs/it-is-easy-to-expose-users-secret-web-habits-say-researchers

An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: Two German researchers say they have
exposed the porn-browsing habits of a judge, a cyber-crime investigation and
the drug preferences of a politician. The pair obtained huge amounts of
information about the browsing habits of three million German citizens from
companies that gather "clickstreams." These are detailed records of everywhere
that people go online. The researchers argue such data -- which some firms
scoop up and use to target ads -- should be protected. The data is supposed to
be anonymised, but analysis showed it could easily be tied to individuals.
People's browsing history is often used to tailor marketing campaigns. The
results of the research by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes were revealed at the
Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas this weekend. The pair found that 95%
of the data they obtained came from 10 popular browser extensions. "What these
companies are doing is illegal in Europe but they do not care," said Ms Eckert,
adding that the research had kicked off a debate in Germany about how to curb
the data gathering habits of the firms.

[image 2][2][image 4][4][image 6][6]

Read more of this story[7] at Slashdot.
[image 8]

Links:
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[3]: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F17%2F07%2F31%2F1446213%2Fit-is-easy-to-expose-users-secret-web-habits-say-researchers%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook (link)
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[5]: http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/31/1446213/it-is-easy-to-expose-users-secret-web-habits-say-researchers?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=googleplus (link)
[6]: http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png (image)
[7]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/31/1446213/it-is-easy-to-expose-users-secret-web-habits-say-researchers?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)
[8]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/oumFN2mayVs (image)

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Easy to expose web surfers' habits, say researchers RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2017-08-01 01:37 +0000
  Re: Easy to expose web surfers' habits, say researchers Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2017-08-01 08:10 +0100
    Re: Easy to expose web surfers' habits, say researchers Oregonian Haruspex <no_email@invalid.invalid> - 2017-08-09 14:33 +0000

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