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Sites Guilty of Hijacking History 58

Posted by CmdrTaco from the break-out-the-foil-hats dept.
Gunkerty Jeb writes "A recent study launched by the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science to determine the scope of privacy-violating information flows at popular websites shows that popular Web 2.0 applications such as mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are teeming with various kinds of privacy-violating flows. Ultimately the researchers determined that such attacks are not being adequately defended against."
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Sites Guilty of Hijacking History More

Sites Guilty of Hijacking History

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  • Less Than One Percent is Teeming? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohnNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday December 06, 2010 @10:57AM (#34460376) Journal

    ... shows that popular Web 2.0 applications such as mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are teeming with various kinds of privacy-violating flows.

    So they inspect the top 50,000 sites and 485 have some level of inferring browser history data? I'm not so sure I see the abundance noted in the summary. Less than one percent is teeming? And only one of those sites is ranked in the top 100 by Alexa?

    I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about this or we should ignore it but come on.

    Just face it, websites often operate on razor thin margins. They live and die by the clicking of advertisements on their pages. Now they've found a way to sell private information that could be mildly useful to the right bidder. And it turns out it mostly adult websites that stream video doing this. You might have cause for being upset but anyone familiar with business models of seedy websites should not be surprised.

    I have always used Google Chrome's incognito browser when I go to seedy sites. It's simply not going to be a priority for the masses but for people who are annoyed or angry, it's the best way to deal with this sort of thing. If some major non-adult site were doing this, I think they would be setting themselves up for embarrassment, I'm glad somebody's doing these checks.

  • Wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by biryokumaru ( 822262 ) <biryokumaru@gmail.com> on Monday December 06, 2010 @10:59AM (#34460398)

    I thought that was the whole point of Web 2.0: directly connecting you to people who want to sell you junk you don't need based vaguely on what your interests might be.

    Heck, Netflix recommended Rocky and Bullwinkle based on my interest in Yojimbo, and they were spot on... doesn't get much more Web 2.0 than that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pojut ( 1027544 )

      Yay! Another Yojimbo fan! I am constantly amazed by the number of Kurosawa fans I know that haven't seen it...

      • I just looked it up on IMDB: A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free the town. Sounds like a rehash of "A Fistful of Dollars" to me. :-)
    • Pretty much every film I've watched on the LoveFilm watch online thing ends by telling me that Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption are 'films like this'. After seeing that recommendation, I think I'd quite like to see a film that actually is like both of those...

    • Reminds me of a couple of months back when amazon.de, supposedly based on my previous purchases and pages visited, recommended me 3 new games for very little girls. And I mean really dress-up Barbie stuff. I'm still wondering exactly what has my alter-ego been looking at on Amazon.

  • makes me laugh more than frightens me. It's always amusing to go to some popup-riddled website to look up the lyrics to a song, and off in the corner of all of the irrelevant-to-my-tastes "mp3 ringtone justin bieber ringtones here click here to guess your crush" ads is a singular "32-bit RISC based microcontrollers from Atmel" advertisement.

  • And who's surprised by this? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For-profit websites using questionable tactics to gather information to better target their advertisements. Film at 11.

    • Yeah exactly. Wake me up when you find "conclusive evidence" that adult websites that try to foist spyware onto your machine are also tracking and scrabbing for every little crumb of data on you that they can sell. Adblockplus/Ghostery+Noscript+Private browsing mode = Win
  • Have we finally found out where in the world/time/on earth is Carmen Sandiego?
    • And what the hell is "hi-jacking"? Is that some new Web 2.0 term for something?

      • My first thought was of browser hi-jacking, like when you get a nasty piece of Malware that turns all your redirects your google search links to their advertisements.

        I would think - that "History Hijacking" would mean gaining control over whats in your history - which seems ultimately useless unless you were aiming to embarass someone on false pretenses...

        They really shouldn't use the word "hijacking" out of its real context. Just "reading information" does not constitute hijacking. Even stealing doesn't co

        • They really shouldn't use the word "hijacking" out of its real context.

          The headline didn't even use that word; it used "hi-jacking" (note the hyphen). I was asking what that meant. I've never seen that term before.

          • Agreed. The hyphenation in our advanced concepts of today require hyphenations, but are hi-jacking spellings of already established compound words. Hijack does not need a hyphen. But neither is it a compound word.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by plover ( 150551 ) *

            The headline didn't even use that word; it used "hi-jacking" (note the hyphen). I was asking what that meant. I've never seen that term before.

            It's just editorial hi-jinks, no doubt.

        • I thought maybe some site was pointing a gun at a historian, and forcing him to write about how wonderful Castro has been for Cuba or something.

  • Are people retarded? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_raptor ( 652941 ) on Monday December 06, 2010 @11:12AM (#34460542)

    How do people think that all these "web 2.0" social media sites make money? They do it by selling tracking data about you to research companies and the like.

    It is like super market "loyalty" cards. They aren't primarily handing those out to keep customers loyal they are doing it to gather information about buying habits.

    TANSTAAFL: If you can't figure out the cost of something you are probably being played.

  • For many Slashdot readers, this is old news. But the interesting thing is how awareness of web-privacy issues has hit the mainstream. The Wall Street Journal (whose news pages typically have at least half a dozen trackers on them) has been running a whole series on simple tools to avoid being tracked online.

    I think the place of the Internet in society is entering a new phase.

  • Said it before, I'll say it again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pojut ( 1027544 ) on Monday December 06, 2010 @11:17AM (#34460592) Homepage

    If a site offers up ads on subjects I'm interested in, I have no problem leaving them unblocked. I learn about products I care about, the site gets ad revenue, and the company gets word-of-mouth. Everyone wins.

    So long as sites show me ads relevant to their own subject, I have no problem with them (excluding fly-over ads or ads with sound...those are NEVER ok.)

    • That is a pretty short-sighted point of view. Let me point out that ads these days are far more offensive and far more aggressive than animated GIFs. They come laced with javascript and flash and all sorts of things that can be made to do all sorts of bad things. It also turns out that a great many people get their PCs compromised through ad servers rather than through sites hosting the content you are there for.

      I block ads for security purposes and so should everyone else until they stop putting this cr

  • The article is not particularly good, this one is better: http://www.switched.com/2010/12/02/bug-gathers-your-browsing-history-youporn-perez-hilton/ [switched.com] You can find the original study here: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/lerner/papers/ccs10-jsc.pdf [ucsd.edu] It is quite interesting, especially the list of sites is on page 9...

  • Plugins for history/cookie poisoning? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OpenGLFan ( 56206 ) on Monday December 06, 2010 @12:13PM (#34461290) Homepage

    Back in the dark ages (1997 or so), there was a school of thought that advocated cookie poisoning, not just removal. Anybody know of any firefox plugins that actively randomize your history or cookies? Throwing wrenches into databases is the next best thing to naming your kid Little Bobby Tables.

    • In a related way, I've long wondered if its possible to script some history poisoning. Let them read my history all they want. Eventually, some ad company will get all excited about the new "goatse" phenomenon, and go to see what it is. Hence, every time I start Firefox, I want the whole history replaced with goatse.
      As it is, my hosts file and noscript makes it all go away.

  • "Sites Guilty of Hi-Jacking History"

    I thought this was going to be a much more interesting listing of sites that have blatantly changed the facts to suit their needs. whitehouse.gov, foxnews.com, cnn.com, msnbc.com, prettymuchanyfinanciallendinginstitution.com, etc

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