Well we all expect some type of recording of our visit to webpages. This may just be the simple cookie that stores the date or date and page of your last visit. Some store more and some a lot more. But it appears some sites (and some big names among it) are recording everything you are doing on the web site. They use a service that records all keystrokes, spaces, deletions and so can have a complete “replay” of your session. There are a number of these services that do similar session recording. This is a security risk for your data and you should be made aware of the risks. There are tools that can help stop these sites accessing your data but some sites could be less friendly or even broken by the use of the tools. Javascript blockers such as NoScript, UBlock Origin & Privacy Badger can help keep your browsing safer but must be up to date and enabled to help.
I strongly recommend you read more about this and have provided the following articles to help. The first one references the next article but to save you finding & clicking those links I have placed them here. Some links are to the session recording businesses so you can see what they say they do, they may record your visit so be warned & I have bulleted those sites
Here is a wikipedia article about session recording:
The following is the full zipped list of sites Princeton checked…it is in .csv format (comma separated values) so a spreadsheet program is recommended to view it but isn’t necessary. The list only looked at the top 50,000 visit ranked sites so it is not exhaustive by any means:
Subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s blog/newsletter and never feel safe again. His resume is amazing, his insight is profound, and his books make you want to go live in the woods off the grid … highly recommended reading none the less
Thanks grahroll… this should be added to a web 101 article. You should not feel safe online, in the same way you should not feel safe walking down the highway… at any time some knob could take you out. Vigilance is the key. We pay for our internet service but much of our bandwidth is taken up by websites taking information from us (without asking), so, we’re paying to give companies our information which they resell… doesn’t sound fair does it.
Using web browsers like Vivaldi (who don’t automatically track you), the latest Firefox (which now helps block trackers) or using extensions to block tracking (like Ghostery for Firefox) is part of that vigilance. Ghostery not only blocks trackers but will tell you how many trackers there are. For example choice.com.au has 6. Sydney Morning Herald has at least 14.
When crossing the road we’re taught from a young age to look left and right (and left again) before crossing. We need to do the same online and we definitely need to teach our kids this. Just because we’re safely behind a computer or device does not mean we’re safe
[Apologies unrelated to the topic, but] Honest question as a transplant from the world of left hand drive, but wouldn’t that be right-left-right to see the closer vehicles first and last prior to crossing. While you can stop short if one unexpectedly approaches from the left, if you step out in front of one coming from the right you can be toast.
As do Startpage and DuckDuckGo, well with Startpage you can use a settings cookie to set the way you search but it isn’t required. But it is handy to know of other search engines that do no data collection so thank you for the heads up.
It isn’t so much the searching, though data collection by many search engines is the norm and they should be avoided if possible, it is what happens once you reach the web site and what they do with your data that they collect plus how they store the data. I for one am very wary of this and take as many reasonable steps to make my online interactions as safe as I can, why only reasonable? Because if you want to use the web interactively there are some things you have to allow to get a reasonable experience.
Call 911