Security researchers have discovered that about eight out of ten sites that have a search bar leak their visitors' search terms to online advertisers like Google.
This means they violate users' privacyby leaking data to a vast network of third-party companies, which can then use this data to serve targeted ads or track users online behavior.
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Meanwhile, users' search data on sites is not only transferred to specific advertisers, but is also shared among network or sold to multiple entities. As a result, an accurate assessment of data exposure cannot be made.
Although some sites may state this practice in user , visitors usually do not read it and do not imagine that the information they enter into the built-in search fields is transferred to third parties.
To conduct the research that reached this conclusion, Norton Labs created a detection program capable of scanning and seeing what was happening on a million top sites.
The crawler located the search input on the sites, searched for the term “JELLYBEANS” and then collected all the network traffic.
The idea was to scrutinize the HTTP network request to see if “JELLYBEANS” appeared anywhere in requests to third-party partners, which happened in 81.3% of cases.
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Network requests include the URL, the request referrer header, which provides more details about the resource to be retrieved by the server receiving the request, and the payload , which typically contains browser fingerprint and clickstream data.
The results showed that most leaks came through the referrer header (75.8%) and the URL (71%), while the payloads contained JELLYBEANS in 21.2% of the cases examined.
According to the research, a total of 81.3% of the sites examined leaked information to advertisers.
Norton Labs emphasizes that the actual rate is likely even higher.
As mentioned above, some sites state in their policies that they use this practice. However, the research revealed that only 13% of the one million sites examined reported using “search terms,” while 75% contained the general statement “sharing user information with third parties.”
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Can users do anything?
Unfortunately, there's not much users can do to address this problem. Perhaps the only thing they could do to boost their privacy a bit is to set their browsers to block all third-party trackers from loading on the sites they visit.
There are ways to set it up in Chrome, and browsers like Safari and Brave have these tools built in. You can also use privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo or Brave Browser.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com
