Kathleen Finlay/plainpicture
Have you ever typed something into a search box on a website and then thought better of it? New research shows that 482 sites may be passing on that information anyway.
We have long known that information we provide online can be tracked. A website you visit might have hundreds of scripts running in the background; some deposit cookies, others track you to other websites. The variety of tracking tools mean it is almost impossible to know what happens to your data when you visit a site.
But all of these seem tame compared with what Steven Englehardt and his colleagues at Princeton University found after combing through hundreds of websites to examine the scripts they were running: the widespread use of a type of script, called a session replay, that logs everything you do on a website, including what you type