Cybersecurity research discovered that 80% of well-known websites with a search bar would likely leak their user search terms to online advertisers like Google.
This research has concerned many experts since there could be implications of breaching a visitor’s privacy and exposing information to a massive network of third-party entities. These third-party advertisers could use the disclosed data to deliver targeted advertisements or study a user’s behaviour online.
Subsequently, this user search terms data could be shared by malicious individuals among other network members or could be sold to other entities.
Other websites that admit this practice tends to declare it on their user policy. However, most internet users do not read these policies and assume that their information enters embedded search fields isolated from data brokers.
Millions of websites were studied to know how the user search terms are leaked.
Security researchers developed a crawler that can occur past other browsing disruptions and human confirmation to begin their analysis and know-how websites leak the users’ searches.
The crawler was placed on several visited websites, and the researchers searched for the word “JELLYBEANS” and gathered all network traffic. The idea was to study the HTTP network request to know if the word “JELLYBEANS” shows up anywhere in requests to third-party partners.
Hence, the study found that more than 80% of the cases have exposed user search terms.
The network requests include the URL, the request referrer header, which gives more data regarding the resource to be gathered by the server that claims the request, and the payload. The payload commonly contains browser fingerprint and clickstream data.
The results revealed that most searched term leaks came from the referrer header and the URL, while payloads contained JELLYBEANS in about 20% of the studied instances.
Over 80% of the one million websites visited leaked the searchers to advertisers through at least one of the inspected locations. The researchers elaborated that this detail should be the least, with the percentage likely higher.
The researchers have now noticed that disclosed data shared practices on privacy policies. The crawler then observed that about 13% specified searched term notices, while 75% included the usual sharing of user information with the third-party statement.
