Type systems allow DoubleClick to identify 90% of users

Back in December last year, there were documents that reveal some features of the work of specialists hapless agency NSA. It turned out that the employees of this agency could without difficulty track Web users using a cookie system DoubleClick.

Now there was a publication from a team of specialists at Princeton, where it is stated that in order to track the user does not even need opportunities NSA. For example, the team was able to identify Princeton to 90% of users, traffic tracking systems like Google release DoubleClick.

Thus no particular data access is not required. Experts simply monitor opening network traffic.

As it turned out, such systems provide a lot of information about their users. Specifically, each advertising system provides a unique user ID, but the researchers were able to track the Web requests of specific users, grouping data using the same browser session from system to system.

Using the same cookie in the social networks, the researchers were able to identify users whose requests have been tracked. As mentioned above, this method allows us to identify about 90% of users, which is not bad.

Result: for each page view (pageview), and the user can define the pages that the user views. Security measures like https protocol bit complicated questions of users, but the number of "cookies" advertising systems make the task of identifying users fairly simple.

As far as can be understood only with the protection of networks like Tor makes tracking a user on the network impossible.

Via theverge

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/218395/