We all know about website cookies. Little bits of code that websites use to remember certain things about our online behavior that enables them to offer us a more dynamic and personalized experience. For some people, even this is too far and the European GDPR now requires all websites that collect cookies to both tell users about it and give them an option to opt-out. Unfortunately, according to a new study, things might be a bit more serious than cookies remembering details like what products you were looking at the last time you were on Amazon.
A recently released report called Leaky Forms: A Study of Email and Password Exfiltration Before Form Submission has revealed as much as 3% of all websites may actually be tracking the keystrokes you make on them and storing them even before you hit enter to submit the details. This means that no matter what you are doing, whether that be typing out reviews or inputting your login details, 3% of sites will be tracking and collecting everything you type.
The study, carried out by researchers at several European universities, took a massive sample of 100,000 of the world’s top-ranked websites, which include almost 3 million web pages between them. Out of the 100,000 sites, just under 3,000 of them (2,950) began tracking users’ typed data from the moment they began typing, rather than recording it all when they pressed the submit button.
Interestingly, the previously mentioned GDPR seems to be offering a fairly decent level of protection to Europeans as the study found they were less likely to be breached in this way. The report states that 2,950 sites out of the 100,000 were attempting to track US users, that number falls to 1,844 for European users.
With figures like these, you can see that is more important than ever to move towards a passwordless future like the big tech giants are pushing for or to at least change your passwords regularly. As passwords need to become more and more secure (meaning long and complex), however, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of new ones, which is why the best password managers like Lastpass are becoming an essential part of your cybersecurity toolbox.
