Firefox or iPhone user? How private is your web browsing?

[bigiain]

Do you browse the web using Firefox or an iPhone?  (or an iPod Touch?)

Did you know any website you visit can poke around inside your browser looking for other web pages you've visited recently?

http://bigiain.com/historysniffing.html

There's a proof-of-concept there that trys to show you the sort of stuff a malicious website could find out about you. It'll test to see if it can detect whether you've visited a small list of web pages, and show you the results.

It seems to work with most versions of Firefox 3.6 under MacOSX and Windows NT5 and 6, and both IE7 and IE8. Safari and Chrome are both invulnerable to this particular trick.

I'd be interested to know from people who try it out whether it worked or not, and which browser/device and version you used... (I haven't tested it with many Windows browsers, or any phones except my 3G iPhone upgraded to iOS4.1 and my girls 3G running 3.1.3 )

big

[erkishhorde]

Interesting. It's giving me mixed results. It finds some of the sites I've visited within the last week but missed some like youtube, this thread, gmail, and google. It also tells me that I visited the motogp page but I don't recall purposefully going there anytime recently.

Running fox 3.6.12 in Wino7

[herm]

vista and latest chrome appear to be safe. vista and firefox gave me mixed results (all red and blue) even though i have been to some of the sites.

[ungeheuer]

Firefox 3.6.12 under XP SP3 here.   Only red results for me... some actually visited but mostly not.

[z0mb1e_DUC]

Only site that came up green was your's, Bigiain.  This despite me having the DMF up on another tab.  I'm using Firefox 3.6.12 & WinXP SP3. 

[Billyzoom]

I've got an Iphone and heard about the apps that can track someone's location by their phone number.  This seems pretty creepy to me, and is enough to make me consider switching to another phone.

I'm hardly a power user, so maybe there's an easy way to prevent this.  If not, is there an app? 

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding this, cause there doesn't seem to be the amount of concern that I'd anticipate.  I'm sure stalkers love it.   

Thoughts?

[somegirl]

Firefox 3.6.11, WinXP, only sites that came up were yours, DMF, google and facebook.

[Speeddog]

FF 3.6.12 running on Win XP.
First 3 sites were green, the rest red.
At least half a dozen of those red ones were presently open in tabs, and visited moments before.

FF 3.6.8 running on Win 7HP, it found 9.
Still missed a recently viewed ducati.com.

Java versions didn't pick up more than 2 and 3 respectively.

<Looks around for tinfoil hat>

[ROBsS4R]

If you are talking about the Iphone app you can download that's a parlor trick, a Prank app.

[1KDS]

Mac OS 10.6.4 FF 3.6.6
There are some green ones that I haven't visited and a lot of red ones I haven't been to.  The url's are all generic, like www.craigslist.org not mytown.craigslist.org and advrider.com not advrider.com/dickinaroundindougsgarage etc.  I have referer headers disabled if that changes anything

[Buckethead]

I don't care what your goddam app says, I HAVE NOT been to BBWWorld.com! recently

[GAAN]

I don't care what your goddam app says, I HAVE NOT been to BBWWorld.com! recently

well

now I have

thanks for that

[corey]

big red win for google chrome...