Eikenberg even created a website to test whether he could extract and read the Kaspersky Lab's unique identifier. Since fall 2015, the company has been injecting Javascript code via its various products, including Kaspersky Lab Internet Security and Kaspersky Lab Free Anti-Virus. "Worse yet, the super tracking can even overcome the browser's Incognito mode," he added. In Kaspersky's case, the company will generate a different identifier for each machine the antivirus software is installed on, and the identifier will persist, remaining permanent, according to Eikenberg.
The tech industry calls this " cross-site tracking," and many advertising networks as well as Facebook have used similar approaches involving internet cookies and plugins placed across mainstream web services to follow users from site to site.
If the same Universally Unique Identifier comes back, or appears on another website of the same operator, they can see that the same computer is being used," he wrote on Thursday. "Any website can read the user's Kaspersky ID and use it for tracking. Ronald Eikenberg, a journalist at German computer magazine c't, noticed the code and realized its privacy ramifications. For example, the code and the identifier can look like this: " 9344FDA7-AFDF-4BA0-A915-4D7EEB9A6615/main.js." There's just one problem: The same Javascript code will also tag your machine with a unique identifier that any website you visit can read. The products inject a piece of Javascript code into your internet browser, which can tell you if a website is clean or not. For years, antivirus software from Kaspersky Lab may have given online marketers a way to track your web browsing habits.Īlthough the company's products are designed to protect PCs from cyber threats, Kaspersky Lab chose a questionable way to prevent malicious activity on the web pages you visit.
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