When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind, it doesn't matter. Nothing happens until you hit the button. Maybe not. A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form, according to new research.
The top 100,000 websites were crawled and analyzed by researchers from the University of Lausanne and the University of Leuven. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent, and 2,950 US users' email in some form. Many of the sites incorporate third-party marketing and analytic services that cause behavior, even though they don't intend to conduct data-logging.
The researchers found 52 websites in which third parties, including the Russian tech giant Yandex, were incidentally collecting password data before submission. All 52 instances have since been resolved after the group disclosed their findings.
If there is a Submit button on a form, the reasonable expectation is that it will submit your data when you click it. We thought we'd find a few hundred websites where your email is collected before you submit, but this was far more than we expected.
The researchers, who will present their findings at the Usenix security conference in August, say they were inspired to investigate leaky forms by media reports. The behavior is similar to so-called key loggers, which are typically malicious programs that log everything a target types. Users will probably not expect to have their information keylogged on a mainstream top-1,000 site. The researchers observed a few variations of the behavior. Some sites log data 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110 888-739-5110
In some cases, when you click the next field, they collect the previous one, like you click the password field and they collect the email, or you just click anywhere and they collect all the information immediately.
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