Some top 100,000 websites collect everything you type—before you hit submit
Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user’s email address without their consent, and a staggering 2,950 logged a US user’s email in some form. Many of the sites seemingly do not intend to conduct the data-logging but incorporate third-party marketing and analytics services that cause the behavior.
The researchers say that the regional differences may be related to companies being more cautious about user tracking, and even potentially integrating with fewer third parties, because of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But they emphasize that this is just one possibility, and the study didn’t examine explanations for the disparity.
Source: Some top 100,000 websites collect everything you type—before you hit submit | Ars Technica
