Ask HN: Why does my credit union check if I'm logged into Steam and Reddit?
13 by fanseed | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I was watching the network logs as I logged into my credit union and saw that they attempt to request favicons from lots of third parties including dropbox, accounts.google.com, stackoverflow.com, squareup.com, instagram.com, skype.com, tumblr.com, expedia.de, pinterest.com, de.foursquare.com, eu.battle.net, store.steampowered.com, reddit.com. The favicons are usually loaded from the login page of the service, so I'm guessing they are doing that old trick to see if the browser is logged into those services by requesting the favicon. I emailed them about this and after two months all they said is that it's part of their security software checks and not from anything suspicious. Do they do this to create a 'social media fingerprint' of me as an additional check? Even though a few of the services are the German versions (credit union is in the US) and a few have fixed this so that it doesn't work anymore. It just seems strange and excessive.
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