Over 400 of the World’s Most Popular Websites Record Your Every Keystroke, Princeton Researchers Find - Motherboard
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59yexk/princeton-study-session-replay-scripts-tracking-you
Most people who’ve spent time on the internet have some understanding that many websites log their visits and keep record of what pages they’ve looked at. When you search for a pair of shoes on a retailer’s site for example, it records that you were interested in them. The next day, you see an advertisement for the same pair on Instagram or another social media site.
The idea of websites tracking users isn’t new, but research from Princeton University released last week indicates that online tracking is far more invasive than most users understand. In the first installment of a series titled “No Boundaries,” three researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) explain how third-party scripts that run on many of the world’s most popular websites track your every keystroke and then send that information to a third-party server.
But the scripts don’t just aggregate general statistics, they record and are capable of playing back individual browsing sessions. The scripts don’t run on every page, but are often placed on pages where users input sensitive information, like passwords and medical conditions.
Le marché des sites-tiers est pourri de la tête aux pieds
“Collection of page content by third-party replay scripts may cause sensitive information such as medical conditions, credit card details, and other personal information displayed on a page to leak to the third-party as part of the recording,” the researchers wrote in their post.
It’s not just session scripts that are following you around the internet. A study published earlier this year found that nearly half of the world’s 1,000 most popular websites use the same tracking software to monitor your behavior in various ways.