Add-on development companies for browsers πωλούν το ιστορικό περιήγησης εκατομμυρίων χρηστών σε τρίτους, σύμφωνα με μια εκπομπή που προβλήθηκε στη γερμανική εθνική TV.
Journalists of the German broadcast Panorama managed to gain access to a large collection data 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 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.
Μπόρεσαν να αποκαλύψουν ταυτότητες χρηστών, μηνύματα ηλεκτρονικού ταχυδρομείου ή και ονόματα, για παράδειγμα. Διευθύνσεις PayPal (e-mail), ονόματα χρήστη του Skype ή online check-in by airlines.
What is particularly disturbing is that the information did not stop there. Investigative journalists managed to uncover information related to police investigations, a judge's sexual preferences, internal financial information of companies, searches for 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.
