You think that you are safe whenever you clear you browsing history so that nobody finds out what you have been up to?
There should be a reason for you to worry because a team of expert has revealed that your entire web browser history – including websites you’ve visited while using a private browsing or incognito window – can be recovered
How is this possible?
This is the questioned that is running all over your brain because you thought that this was the safe mode to visit those sites you would not like anyone to notice.
Security experts Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes managed to gather the online habits of some three millions German citizens without their knowledge.
The duo also managed to uncover private web history data on prominent public figures, including judges and politicians according to express.uk.
Speaking at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, the researchers revealed how they used “clickstream” data to unearth users’ private internet habits.
Clickstreams are a digital record of every website and every click a user has made online. This web history data is used to target online adverts to specific users.
This comprehensive data should be anonymised, leaving it indecipherable for other users.
According to the security researchers, they were able to mine data on three million citizens using only 10 popular browser extensions.
Eckert and Dewes were able to identify users by cross-referencing the web visits recorded in the clickstream data with public posts shared by individuals, like a tweet or YouTube video.
When a user visits the admin pages of their own personal social network page – it was even easier for the researchers to identify the user, since only they would have access to that webpage.
Mr. Dewes told the BBC: “The public information available about users is growing so it’s getting easier to find the information to do the de-anonymisation.
“It’s very, very difficult to de-anonymise it even if you have the intention to do so.”
“This could be so creepy to abuse,” Ms. Eckert added.
“You could have an address book and just look up people by their names and see everything they did.”