Report: Popular Analytics Provider Continues to Grab User Passwords

From the Freedom-to-Tinker Blog:

Following the recent report that Mixpanel, a popular analytics provider, had been inadvertently collecting passwords that users typed into websites, we took a deeper look. While Mixpanel characterized it as a “bug, plain and simple” — one that it had fixed — we found that:

• Mixpanel continues to grab passwords on some sites, even with the patched version of its code.
• The problem is not limited to Mixpanel; also affected are session replay scripts, which we revealed earlier to be scooping up various other types of sensitive information.
• There is no foolproof way for these third party scripts to prevent password collection, given their intended functionality. In some cases, password collection happens due to extremely subtle interactions between code from different entities.

Overall, we think that the approach of third-party scripts collecting the entirety of web pages or form inputs, and attempting to filter out sensitive information is incompatible with user security and privacy.

MUCH More About the Issue (Including Screenshots) in the Complete Post (approx. 2650 words)

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