Posts tagged comScore

We've Got Leakage

Via AdAge:

New research shows that personal information including names and sometimes even email addresses is routinely passed from the biggest sites on the web to third parties such as Google, ComScore and Facebook.

Conducted by researchers at Stanford University, the study shows how personal information is commonly — and often unintentionally — leaked when a username is included as part of a URL or a page title after a user registers to use a site, for example. Third parties embedded in that page could receive the URL — and, thus, the user’s name, which is often easily deduced from a username or user ID — in a referrer header, or the data informing a website about pages that link to it, explained Jonathan Mayer, lead researcher on the project.

Mr. Mayer and his group looked at 185 of Quantcast’s top 250 sites — sites that allow users to sign in or provide other identifying information, don’t require a purchase for sign-up, and that weren’t inordinately complex (thus excluding Google, Facebook and Yahoo) — and used fictitious accounts to create profiles or change user settings. They then examined the referrer headers and other relevant data that resulted from the interactions and searched them for personal information.

According to their findings, a username or user ID was leaked to third parties on 109 websites, or 59% in their sample, and the top five recipients of leaked information were sites operated by ComScore, Google Analytics, Quantcast, Google’s DoubleClick ad platform and Facebook.