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 obtain access in a large data collection that contained browsing history from around 3 million German internet users.
This data is collected by companies developing browser extensions for various popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Journalists reported only one add-on, named Web of Trust or WoT, but did not fail to add that data is being collected from too many browser extensions or browsers.
These extensions can record every movement of the user on the webnetwork through browsers depending on how they are designed.
The data the journalists bought contained more than ten billion web addresses. The data was not fully anonymized as the team was able to identify them users in various ways.
They were able to reveal user identities, messages e-mail or even names, for example. PayPal (email) addresses, Skype usernames or online check-in from airlines.
What is particularly worrying is that the information did not stop there. Researchers have been able to reveal information about police investigations, a judge's sexual preferences, internal financial business intelligence, drug searches, and prostitutes.
German journalists 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 may sell the data again 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.
