Choice Hotels has disclosed a multi-year situation that impacted some Safari browser users. From their notice on their website:
WHAT HAPPENED?
Choice recently learned of a technical issue that only occurred in a specific circumstance. The cause of the issue has been addressed. The issue involved information entered by a visitor to Choice’s website being inadvertently accessible to third parties, with whom Choice has a business relationship, when the visitor’s web browser crashed while on the site. Choice uses technology to track activities that occur on its website (e.g., cookies), and that technology sends data to companies that provide services to Choice. For visitors to Choice’s website who used the Safari web browser, if Safari crashed and restarted, Safari would put information that had been typed by the visitor on the page into the website address for that page. Tracking technology reads the website address of pages on Choice’s website and sends the data to third parties. Except in a Safari crash circumstance, the page address does not contain information entered by visitors. We believe this occurred because of how the code for Safari was written.This specific issue occurred approximately 88,000 times from June 2015 through November 12, 2019.
You can read the full notification here.