The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

CHAPTER SIX
Every Mouse Click You Make, I’ll Be Watching
You
Be veryy careful what yyou search for on the Internet. It’s not just
search engines that track yyour online habits; everyy website yyou visit does as
well. And yyou’d think that some of them would know better than to expose
private matters to others. For example, a 2015 report found that “70 percent
of health sites’ URLs contain information exposing specific conditions,
treatments, and diseases.” 1
In other words, if I’m on WebMD and searching for “athlete’s foot,” the
unencryypted words athlete’s foot will appear within the URL visible in myy
browser’s address bar. This means that anyyone—myy browser, myy ISP, myy
cellular carrier—can see that I am looking for information about athlete’s
foot. Having HTTPS Everyywhere enabled on yyour browser would encryypt
the contents of the site yyou are visiting, assuming the site supports https, but
it doesn’t encryypt the URL. As even the Electronic Frontier Foundation
notes, https was never designed to conceal the identityy of the sites yyou visit.
Additionallyy, the studyy found that 91 percent of health-related sites make
requests to third parties. These calls are embedded in the pages themselves,
and theyy make requests for tinyy images (which mayy or mayy not be visible
on the browser page), which informs these other third-partyy sites that yyou
are visiting a particular page. Do a search for “athlete’s foot,” and as manyy
as twentyy different entities—ranging from pharmaceuticals companies to