Dark clouds and silver linings: impact of COVID-19 on internet users' privacy.

Objectives: To examine the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the extent of potential violations of Internet users' privacy.

Materials And Methods: We conducted a longitudinal study of the data sharing practices of the top 1000 websites in the United States between April 9 and August 27, 2020. We fitted a conditional latent growth curve model on the data to examine the longitudinal trajectory of the third-party data sharing over the 21 weeks period of the study and examine how website characteristics affect this trajectory.