Barry Levine says, “Data privacy advocates — and marketers concerned about ensuring user privacy — may have a new worry.

It’s possible to determine a user’s real identity — up to 70 percent of the time — simply from an anonymous browsing history.

That’s the key finding in a recently released paper from researchers at Princeton and Stanford universities. The paper, “De-anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks,” is scheduled for presentation in April at the World Wide Web Conference in Perth, Australia.

One of the paper’s authors, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton Arvind Narayanan, said in a statement that the new research “shows that anyone with access to browsing histories — a great number of companies and organizations — can identify many users by analyzing public information from social media accounts.”

In the paper, the researchers describe how they could deduce a user’s profile on Twitter through a model of web browsing behavior that utilized only a user’s anonymous browsing to 30 link destinations. And the computer processing can complete the task in less than a minute”.

Study: Your anonymous web browsing isn’t as anonymous as you think

Martech Today

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