Add-on developers for browsers sell the browsing history of millions of users to third parties, according to a show broadcast on German national television.
Journalists of the German broadcast Panorama managed to gain access to a large collection data which contained browsing history from around 3 million German internet users.
This data is collected by Companies who develop browser extensions for various popular browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.
Journalists reported only one add-on, with the name Web of Trust or WoT, but they did not fail to add that the data is collected by too many browser extensions or browsers.
These extensions can capture every user's internet traffic through the browser depending on how they are designed.
The data that journalists bought contained more than ten billion web addresses. The data was not completely anonymous, as the team managed to identify users in different ways.
They were able to reveal user identities, emails or even names, for example. PayPal (e-mail) addresses, Skype usernames or online check-in by airlines.
What is particularly disturbing is that the information did not stop there. The researchers δημοσιογράφοι κατάφεραν να αποκαλύψουν πληροφορίες σχετικές με έρευνες της αστυνομίας, τις σεξουαλικές προτιμήσεις ενός δικαστή, την εσωτερική χρηματοοικονομική πληροφόρηση επιχειρήσεων, αναζητήσεις για drugs, and prostitutes.
German journalists have reported that the Web of Trust extension can collect information such as date, location, web address, and username. This information is sold to third parties who can sell the data back to other interested companies.
WOT notes on its website that it has the data to third parties but only in an anonymous form. The team of journalists as we mentioned above managed to find more than one user accounts, which suggests that anonymization does not work as it should.
Let's say that the expansion has gone over 140 millions of times and not just by German citizens.