Skip to Content

Epic Abandons Controversial ‘History-Sniffing’ Practice

Epic Marketplace has quietly stopped using controversial “history-sniffing” techniques that enabled it to learn which sites Web users previously visited. The company’s history-sniffing practices were exposed last month by researchers at Stanford. At the time, Epic defended its use of the technology — which it called “segment verification” — saying that the purpose is “to measure the accuracy of the data that a company purchases from data vendors.”