Security researchers have found that roughly eight out of ten websites featuring a search bar will leak their visitor’s search terms to online advertisers like Google.
This practice has the implication of breaching the users’ privacy and leaking sensitive information to a massive network of third parties who can then use this data to deliver targeted advertisements or track your behavior on the web.
This data is shared among the network members or sold to more entities, leaving users unable to estimate their exposure or stop its dissemination.
While some websites may declare this practice in their user policy, visitors typically don’t read these and assume that the information they enter on embedded search fields is isolated from big data brokers.
Crawling 1 million sites
To conduct this research, Norton Labs created a crawler capable of going past “interstitials” or other browsing disruptions and human-confirmation challenges to scan what happens on the top million websites.....
Please Read More Here:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-80-percent-of-the-top-websites-leak-user-searches-to-advertisers/
