Forget about your information being part of some aggregated and anonymized data set.
And those ads that follow you from website to website? That's nothing.
Privacy on the web has reached a new low and you, specifically you, are the target.
Researchers at Princeton University say a growing list of companies offer to record actual video of your screen and all your actions when you visit a website.
You can be watched live, or on-demand video can be purchased after you are gone. The tech that makes this possible is known as a "session-replay script."
"These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers. Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder."
And although several of the services have redaction options for hiding passwords or credit card numbers, most have to be configured for this to work. Reasearchers found lots of leaky data, like the example below, which allowed credit card numbers to be included in the recording.
"Manual redaction of personally identifying information displayed on a page is a fundamentally insecure model," the researchers say.
"In addition to collecting user inputs, the session recording companies also collect rendered page content. Unlike user input recording, none of the companies appear to provide automated redaction of displayed content by default; all displayed content in our tests ended up leaking."
Walgreens is one of hundreds of companies using a session-replay script service. See what researchers found when interacting with Walgreens.com, and see their list of thousands of websites with this technology installed, in their complete report.
And be aware that everything you type—even things you erase and never submit—may very well be recorded and sold to a third party.
There is no telling where that information and video goes from there.