Study: Your anonymous web browsing isn’t as anonymous as you think

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Data privacy advocates — and marketers concerned about ensuring user privacy — may have a new worry.

It's possible to determine a user's real identity — up to 70 percent of the time — simply from an anonymous browsing history.

That's the key finding in a recently released paper from researchers at Princeton and Stanford universities. The paper, "De-anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks," is scheduled for presentation in April at the World Wide Web Conference in Perth, Australia.

One of the paper's authors, assistant professor of computer science at Princeton Arvind Narayanan, said in statement that the new research "shows that anyone with access to browsing histories — a great number of companies and organizations — can identify many users by analyzing public information from social media accounts."

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.
Source: Study: Your anonymous web browsing isn't as anonymous as you think