(Security practitioners have long discouraged the publishing of sensitive information on pages that aren't password protected, but the practice remains widespread.)Īccording to the researcher who discovered and extensively documented the problem, this non-stop flow of sensitive data over the past seven months has resulted in the publication of links to: Thus, the published links could allow viewers to access the content at these pages. Web histories may not sound especially sensitive, but a subset of the published links led to pages that are not protected by passwords-but only by a hard-to-guess sequence of characters (called tokens) included in the URL. Most of these collected Web histories were then published by a fee-based service called Nacho Analytics, which markets itself as “God mode for the Internet” and uses the tag line “See Anyone’s Analytics Account.” These extensions collected the URLs, webpage titles, and in some cases the embedded hyperlinks of every page that the browser user visited. DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people’s browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head.ĭataSpii begins with browser extensions-available mostly for Chrome but in more limited cases for Firefox as well-that, by Google's account, had as many as 4.1 million users. When we use browsers to make medical appointments, share tax returns with accountants, or access corporate intranets, we usually trust that the pages we access will remain private.

Hoverzoom violates google chrome store