Membrane Domain Security Center
What happens when you open an email and allow it to display embedded images and pixels? You may expect the sender to learn that you’ve read the email, and which device you used to read it. But in a new paper we find that privacy risks of email tracking extend far beyond senders knowing when emails are viewed. Opening an email can trigger requests to tens of third parties, and many of these requests contain your email address. This allows those third parties to track you across the web and connect your online activities to your email address, rather than just to a pseudonymous cookie.
How it works. Email tracking is possible because modern graphical email clients allow rendering a subset of HTML. JavaScript is invariably stripped, but embedded images and stylesheets are allowed. These are downloaded and rendered by the email client when the user views the email.[2] Crucially, many email clients, and almost all web browsers, in the case of webmail, send third-party cookies with these requests. The email address is leaked by being encoded as a parameter into these third-party URLs.
You may know that most websites have third-party analytics scripts that record which pages you visit and the searches you make. But lately, more and more sites use “session replay” scripts. These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers. Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder.
https://motherboard.vice.com/
Over 400 of the World’s Most Popular Websites Record Your Every Keystroke
Prominent companies who use the scripts include men’s retailer Bonobos.com, Walgreens.com, and the financial investment firm Fidelity.com. It’s also worth noting that 482 might be a low estimate. It’s likely that the scripts don’t record every user that visits a site, the researchers told me. So when they were testing, they likely did not detect some scripts because they were not activated. You can see all the popular websites that utilize session replay scripts documented by the researchers here.
The Walgreen’s example runs afoul of HIPPA in, oh, so many ways.
List of sites discovered (I bet many, many more are doing it)
https://webtransparency.cs.
Disable all scripting. Disable images. Hell, I’m almost at the point of disabling stylesheets, that’ll be the next tracker if they aint doing it already.
I guess, just use surfraw and parse the output. Or go oldschool and lynx/links.
sidd