Websites are becoming increasingly smarter at collecting and sharing your information.
Is this website leaking?
An extensive investigation of the top 100,000 websites revealed that a lot of the information people entered into the site’s forms was being leaked to third-party trackers before people even hit the submit button. It found thousands of such websites leaking everything from email addresses to passwords, though thankfully many of these issues were fixed after the researchers contacted them.
“It’s concerning to see websites leaking passwords,” Rick McElroy, Principal Cybersecurity Strategist at VMware, told Lifewire via email in response to the research. “I’m glad to see that organizations, after being notified, have made changes to their code to stop the practice.”
The study was conducted to determine whether online trackers abuse access to web forms. The researchers point to a survey that found that 81% of respondents admitted to abandoning online forms at some point.
