Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

Post by WilTimSon » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

slipheen wrote: post #4

the_jeremy wrote: post #3

Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.

Consider for example, that many pages use remotely loaded resources. I would think things like Facebook/Twitter like buttons or Google Fonts might make it to assemble this history. Sites like FB are said to maintain "Shadow Profiles" of people, even when those people aren't using their service directly. I suppose in theory any sufficiently shared infrastructures such as AWS/Cloudflare could do so as well, but they ar…

Post by option » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

g42gregory wrote: post #2

Interesting. I also think that the browser signature, together with IP address, will probably come very close to uniquely identifying users.

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #8

stefan_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malicious extensions are a likely culprit. This is the ultimate irony of the whole WebExtensions debacle; browser vendors wanted to stop the extensions from interacting with the browser because maintaining that interface is work, so now the most trivial extensions will request full access to all websites so they can inject scripts. To bring back "backspace navigates back" I have an extension that needs just that.

Needing javascript that embeds in every page for basic mouse and keyboard behaviour is insane. No clue why they decided it should be the only viable option.

Post by Lordarminius » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

Post by MattGaiser » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #14

Here in the UK, date of birth and post code is enough to identify something like 95% of people. Anonymised data sets are not really possible once you have more than a few varriables. Most people don't know this.