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While the concern for user privacy is certainly understandable, abolishing the HTTP referer does not solve the issue. In fact it can be argued that it could do
by gergo_v 12y ago
While the concern for user privacy is certainly understandable, abolishing the HTTP referer does not solve the issue. In fact it can be argued that it could do harm than good - basically every web based business relies on it in one way or another (customer acquisition channels, news mentions, backlinks, attribution, etc).
The referrer itself is not at all used in tracking the user - as the visitor data is usually aggregated by referring source. Fingerprinting and evercookies are much more common ways of tracking individual users, and you can bet that there are even more advanced methods available for government agencies with service-level access.
- marco1 12y agoOf course, it is used for tracking. Fingerprinting and evercookies are the means to identify users, referers are one of the many things that you then track, assigned to those user identifiers. Apart from that, inadvertently leaking information is easy with the HTTP referer.
- gergo_v 12y agoI've worked with quite a few pieces of security software that rely on user tracking, and the referrer information was only used (if at all) to tie-in with other parts of the system (ie. which marketing channel brought the user in).