A study conducted by Stanford University and Princeton University researchers has found that anonymous browsing data can be frequently tied back to actual identities, The Conversation reports. After having users "donate" their browsing history, researchers attempted to connect the data with their Twitter accounts. "Seventy-two percent of people who we tried to deanonymize were correctly identified as the top candidate in the search results, and 81 percent were among the top 15 candidates," researcher Jessica Su writes. "This is, to our knowledge, the largest-scale demonstration of deanonymization to date, since it picks the correct user out of hundreds of millions of possible Twitter users," she adds. "In addition, our method requires only that a person clicks on the links appearing in their social media feeds, not that they post any content — so even people who are careful about what they share on the internet are still vulnerable to this attack."
Full Story