The time it takes web pages to respond to spurious access attempts made using your email address or browser can tell fraudsters whether you shop at that site, or even reveal details about your email contents.
Timing tricks on the web are not new. In 2000 cryptographers at Princeton University demonstrated that the time taken by your browser to query a website could reveal to hackers whether you have previously visited that site. But now it appears that far more personal data can be gleaned by measuring how quickly web pages respond to various queries, says Andrew Bortz who discovered…
