Shopping for privacy: Purchase details leaked to PayPal

status: publishe

Shopping for privacy: Purchase details leaked to PayPal

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. We present a new form of online tracking: explicit, yet unnecessary leakage of personal information and detailed shopping habits from online merchants to payment providers. In contrast to the widely debated tracking of Web browsing, online shops make it impossible for their customers to avoid this dissemination of their data. We record and analyse leakage patterns for the 881 most popular US Web shops sampled from actual Web users' online purchase sessions. More than half of the sites we analysed shared product names and details with PayPal, allowing the payment provider to build up fine-grained and comprehensive consumption profiles about its clients across the sites they buy from, subscribe to, or donate to. In addition, PayPal forwards customers' shopping details to Omniture, a third-party data aggregator with even larger tracking reach than PayPal itself. Leakage to PayPal is commonplace across product categories and includes details of medication or sex toys. We provide recommendations for merchants.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Shopping for privacy: Purchase details leaked to PayPal journaltitle: Electronic Commerce Research and Applications articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2015.11.004 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Purchase details leaked to PayPal

© International Financial Cryptography Association 2015. We describe a new form of online tracking: explicit, yet unnecessary leakage of personal information and detailed shopping habits from online merchants to payment providers. In contrast to Web tracking, online shops make it impossible for their customers to avoid this proliferation of their data. We record and analyse leakage patterns for N = 881 US Web shops sampled from Web users’ actual online purchase sessions. More than half of the sites shared product names and details with PayPal, allowing the payment provider to build up comprehensive consumption profiles across the sites consumers buy from, subscribe to, or donate to. In addition, PayPal forwards customers’ shopping details to Omniture, a third-party data aggregator with an even larger tracking reach. Leakage to PayPal is commonplace across product categories and includes details of medication or sex toys. We provide recommendations for merchants.status: publishe