<story><title>NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quesera</author><text>Please do post your research when it&amp;#x27;s cooked. It sounds like useful stuff.&lt;p&gt;Firefox, ABE, NoScript, Request Policy, Ghostery, HTTPS-everywhere, hygiene.&lt;p&gt;The irony of my militant approach toward privacy is that I probably make myself more interesting to would-be eavesdroppers by my carefulness than I would if they could see it all -- I&amp;#x27;m just not that interesting.&lt;p&gt;On the plus side, the LCD of legitimate-threat hostiles is greatly increased. I&amp;#x27;m fairly boring even to neighbors and law enforcement and copyright holders and scam artists and advertisers. I imagine I&amp;#x27;m pretty stultifying to nation-state actors. :)&lt;p&gt;Still, I&amp;#x27;d like everyone else to join me so that I can get lost in the crowd. The untracked, encrypted, well-rested crowd.&lt;p&gt;Come on in, the water&amp;#x27;s fine.</text></item><item><author>Smerity</author><text>There are two primary issues here: the prevalence of Google Analytics and the unencrypted nature of the majority of websites.&lt;p&gt;Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own partial results from a research project I&amp;#x27;m doing using Common Crawl estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them[2].&lt;p&gt;That means that you&amp;#x27;re basically either on a site that has Google Analytics or you&amp;#x27;ve likely just left one that did.&lt;p&gt;If the page you&amp;#x27;re on has Google Analytics and isn&amp;#x27;t encrypted, the Javascript request and response is in the clear. That JS request to GA also has your referrer in it, in the clear.&lt;p&gt;The aim of my research project is to end with understanding what proportion of links either start or end in a page with Google Analytics. If it starts with Google Analytics, your present &amp;quot;location&amp;quot; is known. If the link ends with Google Analytics, but doesn&amp;#x27;t start with it, then when you reach that end page, the referrer sent to GA in the clear will state where you came from.
All of this is then tied to your identity.&lt;p&gt;If people are interested when I get the results of my research, ping me. I&amp;#x27;ll also write it up and submit it to HN as it would seem to be of interest.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;trends.builtwith.com&amp;#x2F;analytics&amp;#x2F;Google-Analytics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkoIUmP5ma8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=pkoIUmP5ma8&lt;/a&gt; (GA specific results at 1:20)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdoering</author><text>Greetings. I nearly have the same policy, regarding surfing and my addons.&lt;p&gt;I would only advise against Ghostery, as they whitelist some trackers, if being paid. With every update I had to reselect these trackers.&lt;p&gt;And Evidon (Ghostery&amp;#x27;s mothership) selling usageinformation really bugs me: &lt;a href=&quot;http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/31/ghostery-a-web-tracking-blocker-that-actually-helps-the-ad-industry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;venturebeat.com&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;31&amp;#x2F;ghostery-a-web-tracking-bl...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend the FF-addon Diconnect: &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disconnect/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;en-US&amp;#x2F;firefox&amp;#x2F;addon&amp;#x2F;disconnect&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have an idea, how I could make my own sites secure in a relatively cheap way? Just a personal site with not that much traffic, so spending much money seems a bit off to me.&lt;p&gt;Ideas?</text></comment>
<story><title>NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quesera</author><text>Please do post your research when it&amp;#x27;s cooked. It sounds like useful stuff.&lt;p&gt;Firefox, ABE, NoScript, Request Policy, Ghostery, HTTPS-everywhere, hygiene.&lt;p&gt;The irony of my militant approach toward privacy is that I probably make myself more interesting to would-be eavesdroppers by my carefulness than I would if they could see it all -- I&amp;#x27;m just not that interesting.&lt;p&gt;On the plus side, the LCD of legitimate-threat hostiles is greatly increased. I&amp;#x27;m fairly boring even to neighbors and law enforcement and copyright holders and scam artists and advertisers. I imagine I&amp;#x27;m pretty stultifying to nation-state actors. :)&lt;p&gt;Still, I&amp;#x27;d like everyone else to join me so that I can get lost in the crowd. The untracked, encrypted, well-rested crowd.&lt;p&gt;Come on in, the water&amp;#x27;s fine.</text></item><item><author>Smerity</author><text>There are two primary issues here: the prevalence of Google Analytics and the unencrypted nature of the majority of websites.&lt;p&gt;Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own partial results from a research project I&amp;#x27;m doing using Common Crawl estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them[2].&lt;p&gt;That means that you&amp;#x27;re basically either on a site that has Google Analytics or you&amp;#x27;ve likely just left one that did.&lt;p&gt;If the page you&amp;#x27;re on has Google Analytics and isn&amp;#x27;t encrypted, the Javascript request and response is in the clear. That JS request to GA also has your referrer in it, in the clear.&lt;p&gt;The aim of my research project is to end with understanding what proportion of links either start or end in a page with Google Analytics. If it starts with Google Analytics, your present &amp;quot;location&amp;quot; is known. If the link ends with Google Analytics, but doesn&amp;#x27;t start with it, then when you reach that end page, the referrer sent to GA in the clear will state where you came from.
All of this is then tied to your identity.&lt;p&gt;If people are interested when I get the results of my research, ping me. I&amp;#x27;ll also write it up and submit it to HN as it would seem to be of interest.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;trends.builtwith.com&amp;#x2F;analytics&amp;#x2F;Google-Analytics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkoIUmP5ma8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=pkoIUmP5ma8&lt;/a&gt; (GA specific results at 1:20)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigiain</author><text>Idea: A service to allow people to anonymously &amp;quot;share&amp;quot; Google tracking cookies. Perhaps a local transparent proxy that MITMs all your cleartext Google requests, and re-writes the tracking codes on the fly, submitting the ones you&amp;#x27;ve been given and retrieving other &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; ones from a service (probably a TOR hidden service?)</text></comment>