Not even close, while all the sites it said I visited, I had, it missed tons of other sites I'd visited.
It said I have not visited any of them, except google (there it just says "whoops", I'm not sure if that is a hit or not).
Same here on ipad
I too know the websites you visited
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#62There's another trick you can use, for detecting if somebody is logged in to certain sites. See:
https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri...
Although, the Google test on that page is currently broken. The Facebook and Twitter ones aren't.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#63Throwaway account. My company created an analytics product around the ability to track which sites your visitors have visited. It used a different and (at the time) more reliable technique. About a year after the product launch we were contacted by a powerful washington based lobby group and they wanted to chat. They felt it violated a site visitor's "reasonable expectation of privacy". I agreed. So we pulled the fea…
Open-source it?
Somehow I think with a throwaway account that's probably not likely.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#64Not even close, while all the sites it said I visited, I had, it missed tons of other sites I'd visited.
It said I have not visited any of them, except google (there it just says "whoops", I'm not sure if that is a hit or not).
Yup, got the same. Then rerunning it said I'd visited almost all of the sites.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It said I have not visited any of them, except google (there it just says "whoops", I'm not sure if that is a hit or not).
Yup, got the same. Then rerunning it said I'd visited almost all of the sites.
You'd expect that, as it works by loading an image from each of those sites.
So your cache will end up with images from each of those sites.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#66Interesting. Twitter and HN yes, Facebook and LinkedIn no. Chromium on Debian.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#67Extremely wrong on Chrome. The first time I ran it, it said I had not visited any of them. Google and HN were definitely browsed today. Ran it again, ALL of them appeared visited. Even sites like abebooks, which I have not visited at all.
That's because the second time you ran it, all the images were in your cache from the first time you ran it. That's the expected result.
Yet another reason this test is useless. If site A uses it, it may get partially correct data, but when you browse to site B, it will return 100% positive, most of these being false positives.
I just don't see any practical application for this method with such high error rates. The methods mentioned above are only valuable if you can guarantee at least relative reliability. By and large the results have been seemingly random, with only one or two persons reporting 100% correctness. So what's the difference between running a test with wildly unreliable results and just doing something randomly?
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, got the same. Then rerunning it said I'd visited almost all of the sites.
You'd expect that, as it works by loading an image from each of those sites. So your cache will end up with images from each of those sites.
I get what you're saying, but if the technique really worked, I'd expect it to have told me the sites I frequently visit on the first run and a 100% score on the second run, but it was only like 80% of that.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#69Apparently I haven't visited HN. :)
I wonder if the use of ghostery, no-script, that sort of thing, is what bamboozles it? Overall, it looks like it's guessing.
Re: I too know the websites you visited
#70Throwaway account. My company created an analytics product around the ability to track which sites your visitors have visited. It used a different and (at the time) more reliable technique. About a year after the product launch we were contacted by a powerful washington based lobby group and they wanted to chat. They felt it violated a site visitor's "reasonable expectation of privacy". I agreed. So we pulled the fea…
Open-source it?
I'm sure it's the trick where you make a bunch of links to various sites, set a :visited color, and then interrogate all of the links with javascript to see what color they are. It's no longer possible on most browsers.