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Some top 100,000 websites collect everything you type:
When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind and X out of the page, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the Submit button, right? Well, maybe not. As with so many assumptions about the web, this isn't always the case, according to new research: A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form.
Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent, and a staggering 2,950 logged a US user's email in some form. Many of the sites seemingly do not intend to conduct the data-logging but incorporate third-party marketing and analytics services that cause the behavior.
[...] "If there's a Submit button on a form, the reasonable expectation is that it does something—that it will submit your data when you click it," says Güneş Acar, a professor and researcher in Radboud University's digital security group and one of the leaders of the study. "We were super surprised 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."
[...] "In some cases, when you click the next field, they collect the previous one, like you click the password field and they collect the email, or you just click anywhere and they collect all the information immediately," says Asuman Senol, a privacy and identity researcher at KU Leuven and one of the study co-authors. "We didn't expect to find thousands of websites; and in the US, the numbers are really high, which is interesting."
[...] Since the findings indicate that deleting data in a form before submitting it may not be enough to protect yourself from all collection, the researchers created a Firefox extension called LeakInspector to detect rogue form collection. And they say they hope their findings will raise awareness about the issue, not only for regular web users but for website developers and administrators who can proactively check whether their own systems or any of the third parties they're using are collecting data from forms without consent.
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
See Also:
Before You Hit 'Submit,' This Company Has Already Logged Your Personal Data:
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bmimatt on Monday May 16 2022, @07:19PM
Perhaps we need a browser plugin that fills forms with garbage in a single click, and we collectively poison the data over time. Bonus points if emails are auto-filled with congress critters addresses.