Website tracking is legal, but at times it is not done with the consent of the user. An astonishing finding from a recent study has revealed top 100, 000; websites that collects almost everything a user types in.
Research on 100,000 Top Websites
Crawling and analysing top 100,000 websites , Researchers from KU Leuven, Radbound University and University of Lausanne targeted European Union and United States for the study. They realized that 1,844 websites collected an EU user’s email address without their consent ,and a mouth-watering 2,950 from the US users.
As if not enough , the researchers also crawled sites for password leaks during May 2021.It was found that 52 websites were “ incidentally collecting password data before submission. The group disclosed their findings to these sites .The 52 cases have already been resolved.”
“ We were super by these results. We thought maybe we were going to find a few hundred websites where your email is collected before you submit, but this exceeded our expectations by far ,” says Gunes Acar , a professor and researcher in Radbound University.
What Next After Knowing That Website See What You Type Before You Submit?
Apparently the group that revealed these findings will have a presentation at the Usenix Security Conference in August. It is at this conference that this issue they have termed “ leaky forms” shall be addressed and probably come up with new guidelines.
On an individual level , one needs to take care of the sites he/she visits. Despite the fact that most of these sites are legitimate big name companies, somehow somewhere they anonymously collect user’s data . The same goes for Smartphone / Desktop Apps,beware the Apps you install and the permissions you allow them.