Is there evidence for referral tracking by CDNs?
Created by: Gitoffthelawn
Is there any evidence to believe, or not believe, that CDN's are recording HTTP referrers (technically referers
) from billions of hits?
For those that aren't familiar, HTTP referrers (technically referers
) are strings that are often transmitted as part of an HTTP request for a resource. That string tells the other resource which page requested it. Historically, most browsers sent them for almost every request, which posed massive privacy and security issues. That's been clamped down a little as of late, but they are still in wide use (and Google appears to use them for some surprising things).
It is trivial to strip out those headers programmatically or via an extension, but most people do neither.
By the way, here is a Mozilla development page regarding this issue: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Features/Shortened_HTTP_Referer_header
So, is there any evidence, one way or another, regarding the collection of this data by CDN's?