Researchers at the University of California, San Diego say certain websites are guilty of sniffing and collating historical browsing information. Called "history sniffing" or "history hijacking," the technique exploits the "referral" attribute and other techniques which have been known for years.

While it was conceded that the practice isn't widespread--485 out of 50,000 sites were identified as behaving suspiciously--the danger of invasion of privacy or security breaches via targeted phishing attempts is real. According to the report, at least 46 sites were actually "caught" stealing personal browsing history, with some surreptitiously inserted via ads.

For now, users of Chrome and Safari will be glad to know that the latest versions block attempts at history sniffing by default, and Mozilla says it plans to add the feature in the next full release of Firefox. All versions of Internet Explorer (IE) do not offer such protection though; IE users must enable "private browsing" to be protected.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Network World
- check out this article at Tom's Hardware Guide

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