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I went to http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ with Firefox, and see a Recent Referrals: (verified) list on the bottom of the page. Some of the sites in my list I have visited, but some were months ago, so I am not even sure if it is bogus or not. How does the site get this list? How can I prevent this type of information from being passed by my browser? I thought the site could only see the referral information if you clicked on a link to their site.

Ben N
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2 Answers2

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Your web browser does not pass such information to web sites. It's just a list of other people's referrals. I can tell that because I have literally never visited most of the sites in that list. The (verified) likely means that they checked the referring links to make sure that there's really a link to their site there (so advertisers can't fill it up with bogus sites). Clicking on the links in that section does indeed take you to external pages that, somewhere, have a link to the site.

It is conceivable, however, that advertisers could place tracking cookies into your browser, which would allow them to easily keep track of which websites with their ads you've visited. That's not going on here, though.

Ben N
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In my opinion, "Recent Referrals" list is the list of referrals from recent visitors, not a list of current visitor's recently viewed sites.

sm4rk0
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