ArticleScientific reports2025
Browsing behavior exposes identities on the Web.
Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online browsing traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains are enough to identify 95% of the individuals. These behavioral fingerprints are stable enough to enable high short-term re-identifiability: we demonstrate that we can re-identify 80% of the individuals in contiguous time slices of data. Our results thus show that what is perhaps the most basic feature of our online habits-namely, which sites we visit most often-is highly unique. Such a privacy threat persists even with limited information about individuals' browsing behavior, reinforcing existing concerns around online privacy.
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Registered trials
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