Security News > 2022 > September > Over 80% of the top websites leak user searches to advertisers
Security researchers have found that roughly eight out of ten websites featuring a search bar will leak their visitor's search terms to online advertisers like Google.
While some websites may declare this practice in their user policy, visitors typically don't read these and assume that the information they enter on embedded search fields is isolated from big data brokers.
The crawler located the search input on the visited sites, searched for the term "JELLYBEANS," and then collected all network traffic.
Many payloads in the HTTP requests were obfuscated, so the analysis tools couldn't identify the search string, but it might have been there.
As for the disclosure of the data sharing practice on privacy policies, the crawler found that only 13% mentioned "Search terms" specifically, while 75% contained the generic "Sharing of user information with third parties" statement.
Searching on privacy-centric engines like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, when possible, would be preferable to using embedded fields.