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posted by janrinok on Saturday July 20 2019, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the nothing-is-safe dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Have your tax returns, Nest videos, and medical info been made public?

When we use browsers to make medical appointments, share tax returns with accountants, or access corporate intranets, we usually trust that the pages we access will remain private. DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people's browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head.

DataSpii begins with browser extensions—available mostly for Chrome but in more limited cases for Firefox as well—that, by Google's account, had as many as 4.1 million users. These extensions collected the URLs, webpage titles, and in some cases the embedded hyperlinks of every page that the browser user visited. Most of these collected Web histories were then published by a fee-based service called Nacho Analytics, which markets itself as "God mode for the Internet" and uses the tag line "See Anyone's Analytics Account."

[...] According to the researcher who discovered and extensively documented the problem, this non-stop flow of sensitive data over the past seven months has resulted in the publication of links to:

  • Home and business surveillance videos hosted on Nest and other security services
  • Tax returns, billing invoices, business documents, and presentation slides posted to, or hosted on, Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit.com, and other online services
  • Vehicle identification numbers of recently bought automobiles, along with the names and addresses of the buyers
  • Patient names, the doctors they visited, and other details listed by DrChrono, a patient care cloud platform that contracts with medical services
  • Travel itineraries hosted on Priceline, Booking.com, and airline websites
  • Facebook Messenger attachments and Facebook photos, even when the photos were set to be private.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:36PM (#869677)

    and anyone who installs slaveware extensions will be treated like a slave.