Advertisers Get Our Personal Information from Trusted Websites

A study made by Stanford Law School reveals that the websites we trust and visit each day, implement all sorts of mechanisms that automatically transmit web advertisers our names, user IDs and email addresses.

185 websites were tested in the research and the results show 113 of them leaked at least a username to a third party.

For instance, Photobucket embeds advertisements on most of the webpages and because the link URLs contain the member's ID, when a customers surfs from one page to another, 31 third-party locations get a hold of this information.

“Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you. Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity. Swap photos with friends on Photobucket and clue a couple dozen more into your username,” revealed Jonathan Mayer, a law and computer science student who led the study.

“Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn't a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical. This is what's happening today.“

Other interesting findings surfaced the fact that Home Depot sent the name and electronic mail address of a customer to 13 companies after he viewed a local ad, while the Wall Street Journal sent the emails of a customer who entered a wrong password to 7 organizations.

Figures also show that some just don't know when to stop, Metacafe sending first name, last name, birthday, electronic and physical addresses along with phone numbers to 2 businesses, as a result of a basic account operation.

Weather Underground launches your inbox in the hands of 22 advertisers while Reuters' validation link makes sure two other companies get access to your mailbox.

Interaction with both Bleacher Report and Classmates.com will get your first and last names sent more than a dozen firms.

“From a legal perspective, identifying information leakage is a debacle. Many first-party websites make what would appear to be incorrect, or at minimum misleading, representations about not sharing PII,” Mayer states.

Even though most of these internet sites display disclaimers in which they vow that no data will be traded, rented or sold without your prior consent, it seems that things are somewhat different, so from now on you don't have to wonder how advertisers get in the possession of your email account which you try to protect so much against spammers.