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A tech-law measurement and analysis of event listeners for wiretapping

74 points by lapcat

by dylan604

1 subcomments

"We find evidence that 38.52% websites installed third-party event listeners to intercept keystrokes, and that at least 3.18% websites transmitted intercepted information to a third-party server, which aligns with the criteria for wiretapping."
They say they autopopulate fields based on field type, but address fields are common to have an autocomplete feature enabled. That would require transmitting data before submitting the form. I didn't see anything about rating probabilities of the transmitted data being benign and useful or nefarious and malicious.

by qingcharles

0 subcomment

Statutory private rights-of-action are devastating to companies on major breaches like this because it entitles large payouts. I'm all for statutory fines, because so many of these things require other means to get payouts (e.g. tort law) which benefits lawyers and settlements much more than statutory payouts do.
IIRC, this is what caused those huge payouts on the biometrics from Facebook and Google who didn't pay proper attention to per-state laws.
I'm assuming they are only tracking obvious third-party data escapes here (e.g. page includes off-domain JavaScript) rather than the less-obvious route here where the first-party receives the data and then shuffles it off to an outside party on the back-end.

by kmoser

2 subcomments

I wonder if it would be possible to write a browser plugin to prevent keystroke monitoring. I realize this might break some sites that rely on intercepting keystrokes, but assuming that doesn't matter, is it even possible? I found a product called KeyScrambler but that seems to work at the OS level.

by hammock

0 subcomment

Which websites are these listeners on? I saw the list of third parties but not the websites themselves.

by Dotnaught

0 subcomment

Is there a way, perhaps via extension or user script, to override third-party keystroke event listeners?