Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
Leaky Forms: Thousands of Popular Websites See What You Type—Before You Hit Submit
Wired | | May 11, 2022
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 and X out of the page, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the Submit button, right? Well, maybe not. As with so many assumptions about the web, this isn't always the case, according to new research.
A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form.
“If there’s a Submit button on a form, the reasonable expectation is that it does something—that it will submit your data when you click it,” says Güneş Acar, a professor and researcher in Radboud University's digital security group and one of the leaders of the study. “We were super surprised by these results. We thought maybe we were going to find a few hundred websites where your email is collected before you submit, but this exceeded our expectations by far.”
See: Modernizing Privacy Law in Canada – Striking the Right Balance
“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," says Asuman Senol, a privacy and identity researcher at KU Leuven and one of the study coauthors.
"We didn’t expect to find thousands of websites; and in the US, the numbers are really high, which is interesting,”
The researchers, who will present their findings at the Usenix security conference in August, say they were inspired to investigate what they call “leaky forms” by media reports, particularly from Gizmodo, about third parties collecting form data regardless of submission status. They point out that, at its core, the behavior is similar to so-called key loggers, which are typically malicious programs that log everything a target types. But on a mainstream top-1,000 site, users probably won't expect to have their information keylogged. And in practice, the researchers saw a few variations of the behavior. Some sites logged data keystroke by keystroke.
See: 6 lessons on online privacy and digital authentication
“The privacy risks for users are that they will be tracked even more efficiently; they can be tracked across different websites, across different sessions, across mobile and desktop,” Acar says. “An email address is such a useful identifier for tracking, because it’s global, it’s unique, it’s constant. You can’t clear it like you clear your cookies. It's a very powerful identifier.”
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