Websites often don’t disclose who can have your data

Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News for Students

People often feel anonymous on the internet. They believe their browsing behaviors and what they buy or write can be a private as they want.

In fact, that’s far from true, a new study finds.

Websites usually offer a statement that describes what they may or may not do with data about a user’s activities. You might be tempted to read through that entire document. But be prepared for disappointment. These documents tend to list only a small share of the sites allowed access to your data.

This new discovery suggests it may be all but impossible for website users to make informed judgments about how private their online activities are.

The new research probed disclosures on data-sharing by more than 200,000 websites. These included, for instance, the Arkansas state government homepage and the Country Music Association site. The study focused on how these sites shared data with so-called third parties. Such recipients of your data could be advertisers or companies that make money selling personal data (such as buying behaviors). The study also examined how those sites had described their policy for protecting the privacy of a user’s data.

Timothy Libert works in England at the University of Oxford. There, he studies data privacy. For this analysis, he used a software tool called webXray. It traced data shared by each of those websites with third-party data collectors.

In all, it tracked 1.8 million sharings of data. Only 14.8 percent of those data shares went to third parties that were named in the sites’ privacy policies. The rest of the data went to unnamed third parties.

Data transfers to widely familiar third parties — Google, Facebook and Twitter, for instance — were more likely to be disclosed than transfers to obscure entities. Take Google. Libert found…

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