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I just received this email and can't believe it.

> In this study an Online Usage Tracker is applied to track which websites you visit, by recording the URLs.

How does this not violate EU privacy laws?

> you are invited to join our Online Behavior Research Panel

Seems to be completely opt-in. No problems.

I would hope that "consent \neq legal". That opens up a huge can of worms, since they imply there would be harvesting EVERY url visted, not just hits on scopus, science direct etc.

Okay, didn't notice that. It was rather hard to read due to the absence of layout. Anyway, it can still be legal; you can agree to a lot of things, especially in the US. One question though would be whether it would be allowed by the institution you're working for; it seems like a massive data leak.

Yea it does seem like the potential for a massive leak. I wonder if employees/academics are even allowed to consent to things like this one university premises.

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