De-Anonymizing Browser History Using Social-Network Data

[Wingman]

Interesting research: "De-anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks":

Abstract: Can online trackers and network adversaries de-anonymize web browsing data readily available to them? We show -- theoretically, via simulation, and through experiments on real user data -- that de-identified web browsing histories can\ be linked to social media profiles using only publicly available data. Our approach is based on a simple observation: each person has a distinctive social network, and thus the set of links appearing in one's feed is unique. Assuming users visit links in their feed with higher probability than a random user, browsing histories contain tell-tale marks of identity. We formalize this intuition by specifying a model of web browsing behavior and then deriving the maximum likelihood estimate of a user's social profile. We evaluate this strategy on simulated browsing histories, and show that given a history with 30 links originating from Twitter, we can deduce the corresponding Twitter profile more than 50% of the time. To gauge the real-world effectiveness of this approach, we recruited nearly 400 people to donate their web browsing histories, and we were able to correctly identify more than 70% of them. We further show that several online trackers are embedded on sufficiently many websites to carry out this attack with high accuracy. Our theoretical contribution applies to any type of transactional data and is robust to noisy observations, generalizing a wide range of previous de-anonymization attacks. Finally, since our attack attempts to find the correct Twitter profile out of over 300 million candidates, it is -- to our knowledge -- the largest scale demonstrated de-anonymization to date.

 

[darko999]

Anonymous or not if big corp wants data about your internet behavior with your ID on it they will get exactly that. The question is how much profit can you make from it lol.

 

[Dirk41]

Yeah I was reading that here
Your Browsing History Alone Can Give Away Your Identity

Lately I thought if it's worth to use different browser for different things ( I actually wanted to open a thread to ask everybody ), like one for social , one for work , etc

And Twitter for example : would add people to private lists , instead of following them , reduce the info trackers can get ?( read my link for more info)

It's difficult to pay attention of all these trackers because think about all people who use mobile social apps: the early click on links on their timeline and then -> tracked I suppose because one the mobile app you don't have ghostery or other a it trackers