Chinese 'Sogou Explorer' browser sends URLs to parts unknown

  • 16 September 2014
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By Richard Chirgwin, 16 Sep 2014
 
A Chinese-language cloud-based browser seems to be snooping on its users, according to research conducted by the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre's (APNIC's) Geoff Huston, George Michaelson and Byron Ellacot.
Speaking to the APNIC 38 conference yesterday, Huston outlined the results of research conducted by APNIC on the dataset the organisation uses to gauge the adoption of IPv6 and DNSsec.
 The research uses Google ads served as embedded.gifs, and the ad can only be retrieved by the user over a v6 connection. Each ad gets a unique URL which also gets reflected back to APNIC – and that's where things got interesting.
Huston told the conference his own interest in privacy, and particularly in the way big data is “sniffing the fumes of your digital exhaust pipe”, led him to look over the URLs that were passed back to the APNIC analysis, and something interesting emerged.
 
The Register/ full article here/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/16/sniffing_the_digital_exhaust_1_in_400_net_users_have_stalkers/

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