The Data You Leave Behind

Big tech is spying on you more than you realize. Some top 100,000 websites collect everything you type—before you hit submit

Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent, and a staggering 2,950 logged a US user's email in some form. Many of the sites seemingly do not intend to conduct the data-logging but incorporate third-party marketing and analytics services that cause the behavior. After specifically crawling sites for password leaks in May 2021, the researchers also found 52 websites in which third parties, including the Russian tech giant Yandex, were incidentally collecting password data before submission.

And I'm shocked - Shocked, I tell you! - to discover that Meta (F*c*book's parent company) is spying on you. I'm less shocked that China's TikTok is spying on you.

The researchers filed a bug report with Meta on March 25, and the company quickly assigned an engineer to the case, but the group has not heard an update since. The researchers notified TikTok on April 21—they discovered the TikTok behavior more recently—and have not heard back. Meta and TikTok did not immediately return WIRED's request for comment about the findings.

Any smartphone app that includes a "Log in using F*c*book" feature is spying on you. Ditto websites. And any other "log in using" feature. Firefox containers together with a fair amount of disinformation will provide some cover, but they have (literally) BILLIONS of dollars riding on their ability to spy on you. They are going to spy on you.