Jonathan Mayer writes:
Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you. Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity. Swap photos with friends on Photobucket and clue a couple dozen more into your username. Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn’t a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical. This is what’s happening today.
Stanford conducted an important web leakage study to assess its pervasiveness, summarized in the blog post. Of note, Jonathan notes the implications:
From a legal perspective, identifying information leakage is a debacle. Many first-party websites make what would appear to be incorrect, or at minimum misleading, representations about not sharing PII.
Read more about the study’s methodology and results on CIS.
Jim Puzzanghera and Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times, Grant Gross of IDG provide some of the extensive media coverage of the study with reactions from others.