7 ms·
I too know the websites you visited
- hackermom 15y agoFails for me on Safari 5.1.2 / OS X. It got 1 site right, 1 site wrong, the rest being "not visited".
- copypasteweb 15y agoRequestPolicy prevents that approach.
- mahmud 15y agoDamn right. Don't handout cookies to strangers unless you're a girl scout.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- fez 15y agoIt only got 4 out of 15 correct for me.
- preek 15y agoInteresting concept, but I'm quite certain that I haven't only been on xkcd. http://dispatched.ch/pic/visipisi-20111203-214939.jpg http://dispatched.ch/pic/visipisi-20111203-214939.jpg
- pnathan 15y agoNope. Only got 1 right. Best of luck, it's an interesting concept!
- joe_the_user 15y agoIt's kind of comforting to see the fails here...
- prsimp 15y agoDoesn't appear to guess correctly in Chrome 15 on OS X (10.7.2). I'm not sure exactly what the 'whoops' means for google - but I've obviously visited HN and have visited a few of the others as well. Screenshot: http://cl.ly/1i0921270W2b1u190b0W http://cl.ly/1i0921270W2b1u190b0W
- shaggyfrog 15y agoI think it got 100% for me, on Safari/Mac. Note that it doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be effective. If it guesses better than 50% (i.e. coin flip), then it could be used to give guesses with at least some confidence. No different than analyzing any other noisy dataset. Because this all works client-side, it can also be done quite invisibly.
- diamondhead 15y agothere is already way better and reliable methods to accomplish same goal. e.g http://ajaxian.com/archives/spyjax-using-avisited-to-test-your-history http://ajaxian.com/archives/spyjax-using-avisited-to-test-yo...
- tmcdonald 15y agoI was under the impression that attempts had been made to hide any effects of :visited styles on the accessible DOM to stop this from working. There's a particularly good article on Mozilla's attempts [1], and the relevant bug on Bugzilla. [2] [1]: http://dbaron.org/mozilla/visited-privacy http://dbaron.org/mozilla/visited-privacy [2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cookiecaper 15y agoRight, but those applications will be for things like online advertising, which is already tracking your visits and/or just assuming you use the popular sites anyway. Can this be used to violate privacy in a meaningful manner if it misses 50% or more of the time? You'd have complete plausible deniability if you were pinned to have accessed some site you don't want people to know you accessed. It can't be used as evidence in anything. What would the threat look like?
- nitrogen 15y agoI oppose user tracking not necessarily because there's something to hide, but because a sense privacy is a fundamental component of a sense of independence, and for me, independence is one of the critical components of happiness.
- nolliesnom 15y agoWith the exception of Facebook (which I visited this morning), the results were accurate (Amazon, reddit, linkedin, wikipedia, youtube). Spoooky!
- kevinalexbrown 15y agoI got extremely inconsistent answers on multiple runs.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mvalle 15y agoIndeed, as the second time you run it, you have visited all those sites, and some of those images are in the cache. The first time, I had one 'visited', the second time about half were 'visited'. I'm surprised not all of them were, though...
- Craiggybear 15y agoMore accurate but a couple of false positives. Chromium on Linux
- Detrus 15y agoonly got HN for me, using Chrome 15 on OSX.
- kingkilr 15y agoNot even close, while all the sites it said I visited, I had, it missed tons of other sites I'd visited.
- jyrkesh 15y agoSame here. There were 3 correct positives listed, and I had about 7 or 8 false negatives.
- thenextcorner 15y agoSame here, although I visited multiple sites listed in the very same session on the browser I have open, the tool only reported one as visited, and Google as a Whoops. It should have reported at least 6 more!
- burgerbrain 15y agoIt said I have not visited any of them, except google (there it just says "whoops", I'm not sure if that is a hit or not).
- jberryman 15y agoSame here on ipad
- shdon 15y agoYup, got the same. Then rerunning it said I'd visited almost all of the sites.
- deutronium 15y agoYou'd expect that, as it works by loading an image from each of those sites. So your cache will end up with images from each of those sites.
- shdon 15y agoI get what you're saying, but if the technique really worked, I'd expect it to have told me the sites I frequently visit on the first run and a 100% score on the second run, but it was only like 80% of that.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dhs 15y agoFrom the 5 sites I visited, it correctly flagged HN, WP and YT as visited, and gave a "whoops" for FB and Google (what does that mean?), which I both visited.
- diamondhead 15y agoNot even close, too. Instead of measuring load time, you can create "<a>" elements verify their rendered color is the color you defined for visited links. It's a trick of old times...
- joshfraser 15y agoa trick that all modern browsers have fixed
- diamondhead 15y agohmm. I thought it's impossible to block that solution since a coder should be able to get the computed value of a style property. I'll try it soon.
- georgefox 15y agoReally interesting concept. This one wasn't as accurate for me as the original Firefox-specifc proof of concept, though. It only picked up on YouTube and Wikipedia. What's with the "whoops" on Google? I do use NoScript and Ghostery, though, and I could see how that might cause some false negatives.
- diamondhead 15y agohttp://ajaxian.com/archives/spyjax-using-avisited-to-test-your-history http://ajaxian.com/archives/spyjax-using-avisited-to-test-yo... come on...
- joshfraser 15y agoas mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that loophole has been closed by all modern browsers. not to say there aren't other ways to get at that information, but it's not as simple as checking the color of a link anymore.
- Technopia 15y agoThe results are not consistent. Each time I click the button it keeps changing and also lists the wrong sites.
- cf0ed2aa-bdf5 15y agoA second try gives me a 'visited' result on almost every page (except techbuy). The first try was pretty correct though.
- cf0ed2aa-bdf5 15y agoMostly right for me except it didn't know I visited twitter and facebook (both tabs are open right now). That's probably due to me blocking facebook and twitter widgets on sites other than Fb and twitter though.
- geuis 15y agoThe other one worked fine on iOS. Yours failed all tests.
- AshleysBrain 15y agoWhat would be a possible use of this attack? I can't think of anything useful you'd do with knowing that you've visited Facebook. And so many people use sites like Facebook you might get a better success rate just always returning "visited" rather than measuring this way!
- TorKlingberg 15y agoIf a malicious website can tell which banking websites you have visited, it can show a phishing page that looks just like your bank.
- bergie 15y agoMaybe you could use it to only show those social sharing widgets that are for services the visitor actually uses. Though I guess WebIntents will eventually be a better way to handle that.
- dangrossman 15y agoAd retargeting without going through one of the high-reach ad networks. Or any product site instantly knowing which competitors you've researched, and tailoring their pricing to that.
- mooki 15y agoGot three - one false positive. Firefox on linux
- rmason 15y agoApparently the key to people not knowing where you visited is to use IE. It missed sites like Twitter and Facebook that are open for me all the time. It did get one site correct, HN ;<).
- click170 15y agoIt guessed HN correctly for me the first time, but on the second run it said I hadn't visited any of the sites, including HN. Perhaps a bug..
- crocowhile 15y agoDidn't work on Opera on Linux (said I never visited any of those sites)
- portentint 15y agoMissed about 75% for me.
- sairamkunala 15y agotry running it again. it will say you visited them all ! script FAIL !
- wasd 15y agoDid not work at all for me. The other one had slightly better results. Win 7 on most recent FF.
- ithrewitallaway 15y agoThrowaway account. My company created an analytics product around the ability to track which sites your visitors have visited. It used a different and (at the time) more reliable technique. About a year after the product launch we were contacted by a powerful washington based lobby group and they wanted to chat. They felt it violated a site visitor's "reasonable expectation of privacy". I agreed. So we pulled the feature and dodged a bullet as this "browser bug" hit the mainstream press a few months later. The feature wasn't a major part of our product's value prop, few of our customers used it and none missed it. So if you're thinking about basing a startup on this, don't. You will get a call very quickly from organizations much larger than you are asking awkward questions.
- swah 15y agoOpen-source it?
- scottkrager 15y agoSomehow I think with a throwaway account that's probably not likely.
- evan_ 15y agoI'm sure it's the trick where you make a bunch of links to various sites, set a :visited color, and then interrogate all of the links with javascript to see what color they are. It's no longer possible on most browsers.
- code_duck 15y agoI wonder if they have contacted Facebook about some of their practices, which may be similar?
- inconditus 15y agoRelated, an advertising company who was accused of tracking history: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6695 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6695
- aespinoza 15y agoExtremely wrong on Chrome. The first time I ran it, it said I had not visited any of them. Google and HN were definitely browsed today. Ran it again, ALL of them appeared visited. Even sites like abebooks, which I have not visited at all.
- dangrossman 15y agoThat's because the second time you ran it, all the images were in your cache from the first time you ran it. That's the expected result.
- cookiecaper 15y agoYet another reason this test is useless. If site A uses it, it may get partially correct data, but when you browse to site B, it will return 100% positive, most of these being false positives. I just don't see any practical application for this method with such high error rates. The methods mentioned above are only valuable if you can guarantee at least relative reliability. By and large the results have been seemingly random, with only one or two persons reporting 100% correctness. So what's the difference between running a test with wildly unreliable results and just doing something randomly?
- dangrossman 15y agoFirst, it's a proof of concept, that's all. Even so, even without doing any work to ameliorate these flaws, it could still be (ab)used. Don't assume that it's only useful if everyone can scan which of the top 100 websites you've visited. Any site could use this to check which competitors' sites have been visited. It's unlikely anyone else has an interest in checking that information, so the cache is not going to be poisoned by anyone else. With knowledge of which competitors a potential customer has checked out, you could do some effective price discrimination -- the guy looking at the $10 solutions sees your lowest price, while the guy looking at some competing Microsoft Dynamics package enters a more enterprisey sales funnel. It's also useful for retargeting. Throw the code up on an ad network and you only test for cache hits against domains of current advertisers. If there's a hit, store it in a cookie so you don't need to check the (now filled) cache again. You can now show ads for companies a person has already had an interaction with, without having to cookie every visitor to the advertisers' sites first. It doesn't take much to come up with (mostly nefarious) uses for this, even without perfect accuracy and even without the ability to have multiple parties check the same URLs. It also doesn't take much to come up with ways to improve the process. You can ameliorate the problem of overlapping testers by having a large pool of URLs from each site to check. The average top 1000 site probably has dozens and dozens of images and other resources per page, each of which can be used for a cache test.
- rohit89 15y agoIt got all of them right for me (Chrome, Windows XP) except for twitter. I got a "whoops" for google multiple times.
- mahmud 15y agoIt said "not visited" for EVERYTHING, except google which says "whoops". I have visited nearly all of them in the last 2 months. But don't despair, I have one of the most hostile browser settings. I have RequestPolicy, NoScript,and Flashblock.
- bermanoid 15y agoSame results here, and I'm not running any of the things you mentioned; also been to many of those sites, within the past few days in many cases. I'm basically on stock Chrome (though I do have Adblock).
- larubbio 15y agoSame for me. I then opened facebook in a tab, reran it and it said I had visited every site except facebook.
- 5hoom 15y agoSafari with adblock and ghostery here, got 8 correct and 18 false positives.
- joshfraser 15y agoIn my case, the ones it got wrong were the images that returned a 304 (not changed) header since they returned significantly faster than fetching the full image.
- swah 15y agoBig miss for Twitter, but cool idea anyway.
- paisible 15y agogot it mostly right initially, I then visited facebook (which it said I hadn't been to), it then told me I visited ALL the websites (except facebook).
- 1bertlol 15y agothat makes sense though (mostly), after you test once all the images are cached on the second run.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoCompletely wrong. Said I visited some I haven't heard of, whooops on Google, and not visited on most of those that I've been to recently.
- fasouto 15y agoOld but related: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/ http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h... Seems like i'm 50% male 50% female :D
- simonbrown 15y agoThat's because the CSS trick it uses doesn't work any more. It would be interesting if someone updated it to use this new trick or even just as a Chrome extension.
- joejohnson 15y agoAgain, this seems to be inaccurate for a large number of people. Can we take these two attempts as evidence that is hard for malicious websites to discern our browser history?
- mike-cardwell 15y agoThere's another trick you can use, for detecting if somebody is logged in to certain sites. See: https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Private_Information https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri... Although, the Google test on that page is currently broken. The Facebook and Twitter ones aren't.
- tronicron 15y agoInteresting. Twitter and HN yes, Facebook and LinkedIn no. Chromium on Debian.
- jamesbritt 15y agoApparently I haven't visited HN. :) I wonder if the use of ghostery, no-script, that sort of thing, is what bamboozles it? Overall, it looks like it's guessing.
- JohnLBevan 15y agoNice trick; though it's a once in a cache-time event.
- bad_user 15y agoI'm on Firefox 9. For all the entries I got "not visited", even though I visit a lot of them.
- davidwparker 15y agoGot only 1 for me- youtube. Several others it said I didn't visit but I did. And it said I visited linkedin, and I didn't.
- tct 15y agoGuessed all of mine correctly with Chrome on Mac. Scary.
- wnoise 15y agoThree false negative, one false positive, and one "whoops".
- ChristianMarks 15y agoDead on for me. Chrome under Ubuntu.
- aaronjg 15y agoI just tried it twice, once on a public wi-fi network. And then again when I got home. It worked very well on the public wifi, and had many false positives at home. It seems to work better on slower internet connections. The script returns calls a site "visited" if the response time of the potentially cached image is less than 1/20 the time of the certainly uncached image. On slow connections the cache is much faster than the uncached. On fast connections it's only slightly faster. However, the known uncached images sometimes have "10x increase in latency" so it seems that based on my (and other's experience) that this is a major problem. One could attempt to normalize this for the sites where appending random query string causes higher latency. Simply precalculate the added latency from images with the random query string on a per site basis. Then subtract it from "uncachedTime."
- sairamkunala 15y agoWhen the script is run the second time, it will show that every site was visited. After the first visit, guess its cached and cannot figure out if its a hit or a fail :) Running in Chrome's incognitive mode is a bit different though. only 7 show up cached the first time its run.
- stewbrew 15y agoNo, you don't. One false positive, many woops, quite a few false negatives. After calling the script a second time, almost all guesses are wrong.
- pwaring 15y agoSaid I hadn't visited any of the sites, except HN (which is easy to guess since news.ycombinator.com will be in the HTTP_REFERER field...). If I re-run the test it still gets some sites wrong (says I haven't visited them when in fact I have). It even claims I haven't visited Amazon both times when in fact it's open in another tab.
- drunkenmasta 15y agoIt said no to sites I had visited. Unless that is what is was programmed to do I'd say it did not work. You can message me for any other info about the test.
- pella 15y agothe Images : facebook: 'https://s-static.ak.facebook.com/rsrc.php/v1/yJ/r/vOykDL15P0R.png', twitter: 'https://twitter.com/images/spinner.gif, digg:http://cdn2.diggstatic.com/img/sprites/global.5b25823e.png, reddit: 'http://www.redditstatic.com/sprite-reddit.pZL22qP4ous.png, hn: 'http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif, stumbleupon: 'http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/i/bg/logo_su.png, wired: 'http://www.wired.com/images/home/wired_logo.gif, ....
- meric 15y agoIt says I've visited HN and Slashdot. I haven't been to slashdot this year, but I did go to facebook...