Researchers Attack Secured Internet Activity To Mine Personal Data

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No need to worry, the technique used by researchers only had an eighty nine percent accuracy rate. Wait, everyone should panic! :eek:

The study looked at more than 463,000 page loads on 10 widely used, industry-leading websites. Healthcare sites included those of the Mayo Clinic, Planned Parenthood and Kaiser Permanente; financial sites belonged to Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Vanguard; legal services sites belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union and Legal Zoom; and video-streaming sites included Netflix and YouTube.
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Not much given in the article about how they did what they did. Too bad.
 
I wonder what would happen if someone invented a browser/plugin that just does random stuff and goes to random places on it's own. So it would create so much erroneous data to make it 10x more difficult to "track" someone's habits.
 
Just like so many "security studies" done in universities, this is an interesting exercise, but woefully impractical, even almost useless, in the real world. It's annoying when these get press and real issues slide.
 
ViperGrendal said:
I wonder what would happen if someone invented a browser/plugin that just does random stuff and goes to random places on it's own. So it would create so much erroneous data to make it 10x more difficult to "track" someone's habits.
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Actually, there have been addons that do just that for a long time. I'm going to be annoying and admit I don't remember them offhand, nor am I going to look for them. Sorry!

It's a decent idea, though.
 
LonerVamp said:
Just like so many "security studies" done in universities, this is an interesting exercise, but woefully impractical, even almost useless, in the real world. It's annoying when these get press and real issues slide.
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I agree. I stopped reading one they said "determining the Web pages". I get it, privacy blah bah, but this is hardly newsworthy. Hell, a better route would be controlling a DNS server and logging IP accesses.
 
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