You may think that your website searches are of no use to anyone but yourself, but for online advertisers they are a goldmine.
Powerful website you should know!
To quantify the extent of this blatant disregard for your privacy, researchers at Norton Labs analyzed the search functions of the top one million websites. Astonishingly, they found that a majority had leaked search terms to third parties, often advertisers.
"Of the top websites with internal site search, we found that 81.3% of these websites leaked search terms in some form to third parties," the researchers wrote. "Websites often leaked search terms in more than one [way]. This shows that most websites, more than eight out of ten, are leaking your search terms."
Norton, presenting at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, argued that their research findings are concerning because of the surprisingly revealing nature of many of our searches. Even seemingly innocuous shopping searches, they explained, can reveal sensitive information about us, such as when shopping for specific medications or test kits.
