And now this…..Whether you are signing up for a newsletter, booking a hotel, or checking out Online, you probably assume it does not matter if you type your email address 3 times or change your mind after you X out. Isn’t it true that nothing happens until you click the Submit button? Not necessarily. This assumption about the Web isn’t always true, according to new research: a surprising number of Websites collect some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form.
First reported by Ars Technica, a group of researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, & University of Lausanne crawled & analyzed 100,000 Sites, looking at scenarios in which a user is in the European Union & visiting a Site from the United States. In total, 1,844 Websites gathered an EU user’s email address without their consent, & a staggering 2,950 Websites logged a US user’s email address in some form. Although many of the Sites appear to not plan to log data, they do incorporate 3rd-party marketing and analytics services that cause this behavior, the researchers claimed.
Here’s more:
- Users’ email addresses were exfiltrated to tracking, marketing & analytics domains before form submission & before giving consent on 1,844 Websites when visited from the EU & 2,950 when visited from the US.
- Incidental password collection was found on 52 Wbsites by3rd-party session replay scripts. (These issues were fixed later).
- Meta (formerly, Facebook) & TikTok collect hashed personal information from Web forms even when the user did not submit the form & did not give consent.
Click here to read the report.
