Comments on: Who spies on your browsing history?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

GimpWii is virus-proof and spy-proof! (Also occasionally annoyingly flash-proof)

The future for the consumer internet is black boxes. General-purpose computing will return to the realm of power users aka hackers.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

All browsers now have “Private Browsing” (aka. porn mode), and it was pioneered in Safari, not Firefox.

By: sbarnes2

sbarnes2 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Anon- how do you use it with later versions? It wouldn’t even let me download it for version 3.5ish that I have.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Visited the site. Now I’m trying to remember when or why I looked up “Necrophilia” on Wikipedia, or, for that matter, “Dancing With The Stars”. The latter revelation disturbs me far more than the former.

By: kaleb

kaleb — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Anon, thanks for that information.
so what’s the best browser in terms of data protection?

By: Niklas

Niklas — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to avoid this kind of data leakage, do roughly in this order of importance:
1. Use Chrome or Safari.
2. Delete cookies, and disable for third party sites if is not a default in your browser.
3. Disable your browser’s history.

By: Gilbert Wham

Gilbert Wham — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Presumably NoScript will settle its hash as well, yes?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

1. Visit the website (possibly with Noscript, if you don’t want the script activating)
2. View page source and copy the list of URLs out.
3. Hours of entertainment. And ads. And there may be a bit of malware.
4. Profit? Nope, just discounts and bargains…

By: William George

William George — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Like we needed another reason to hate Perez Hilton…

By: Cowicide

Cowicide — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not fair to say that “Technorati, TheSun.co.uk, and Wired are also spying on their users’ browsing habits by exploiting this vulnerability.” They are cited in the article for exploiting a different vulnerability, which is collecting mouse movements for usability improvements. It’s the least evil vulnerability they mention.

Thanks for clarifying that, mrb!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Looks like the site is down.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Youporn knows everything about me ;)

By: SteveNZ

SteveNZ — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Anon: The blog article this comes from says the script that exploits the visited history bug doesn’t work at all with either Chrome or Safari — both Webkit-based browsers, I note, although I don’t know if this has anything to do with it. I can’t imagine why Cory didn’t mention this.

Anyway, you might as well porn-surf in Safari in normal mode; the private mode bit is still handy for preserving your sleazy or otherwise browser history from your nearest and dearest, however.

By: mrb

mrb — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not fair to say that “Technorati, TheSun.co.uk, and Wired are also spying on their users’ browsing habits by exploiting this vulnerability.” They are cited in the article for exploiting a different vulnerability, which is collecting mouse movements for usability improvements. It’s the least evil vulnerability they mention. The researchers contend that since a website visitor does not expect mouse movements to be transmitted to a site, it is a privacy violation. However, they don’t claim this data is being shared with other sites or that it is being leveraged to target a customer differently.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Call me paranoid, or just naive, but I use one browser for general browsing (Firefox) and another (Safari in Private mode) when I want to peruse content with a bit more anonymity.

Is this a worthwhile caution or a self-deluded waste of time?

By: millie fink

millie fink — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does CC Cleaner clean out such gunk?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Anon, thanks for that information.
so what’s the best browser in terms of data protection?

Telnet over stunnel. The learning curve is pretty steep, though.

By: millie fink

millie fink — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oops, guess that’s CCleaner.

By: facetedjewel

facetedjewel — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Anon #6

LOL! Yep, I’m doing a mental review too. It’s like passing a cop car and automatically looking in the rearview, even when I know I haven’t done anything worthy of attention. D’oh.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Interestingly, this site is completely unable to find any of my browser history. But I’m using Chrome, so possibly this is Google monopolizing that information.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There was/is a Firefox extension called SafeHistory that came out of Stanford.

You need to do a little editing to make it work with current versions, but it blocks all of the tests on What the Internet Knows About You.

Hopefully someone will pick the project back up and keep it updated.