Communications of the ACM
'anonymous' Browsing Data Can Be Easily Exposed, Researchers Reveal
Two German researchers were able to obtain, for free, data on the "anonymous" browsing habits of more than three million German citizens.
Credit: Steve Marcus/Reuters
A German journalist and data scientist say they were able to easily obtain the "anonymous" online browsing information of more than 3 million Germans by setting up a bogus company complete with a website, a LinkedIn page for its CEO, and a careers site. They used the fake company to test a hypothetical machine-learning marketing algorithm.
"We wrote and called nearly a hundred companies, and asked if we could have the raw [browsing] data, the clickstream from people's lives," says journalist Svea Eckert. Eckert and fellow researcher Andreas Dewes eventually were able to secure the data from a single broker for free.
Eckert and Dewes presented their findings last week at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, noting the 3 billion URLs they acquired were diffused over 9 million different websites. Some site users were infrequent, with only a few dozen sites visited, while others had tens of thousands of data points.
From The Guardian
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