Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the suing-big-brother dept.
heytal writes: "Cnet has an article about lawsuits filed against advertising companies for allegedly tracking customers without their permission." We're going to see a lot more of this in the future.
Plaintiffs allege that (the defendant) has covertly, without consent or authorization, planted 'cookies' upon Internet users' computer hard disk drives and secretly tracked their movements across the Internet," the plaintiffs charged in a filing in Denver, Colo.
How can they do that? If the user has their browser set to accept cookies, and cookies get placed on their system, what is the problem with that? Seems like a case of people's ignorance, and instead of acknowledging that, they decide to sue someone instead.
Too bad the law firms involved (notably Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach) are well known sharks, uninterested in anything but their own bottom lines. These are the guys who mount investor class actions whenever stocks go down, and the ones who sponsored California's Prop. 211 a few years ago.
If an ethical plaintiff were involved, I'd give this story more credence.
Technically, couldn't tracking be considered the same as cracking?
Why is it illegal for Joe Cracker to hack himself into a corp's website/intranet in order to get sensitive information while it's perfectly legal for that same corp to track the user's sensitive information?
I think that license agreement do too much for the big boys and not enough for the users. Wouldn't it be possible for a user to specify his own "license agreement", and then the sites could refuse/accept him as a viewer of that content? If such a mechanism could be put in place, the sites wouldn't have any choice but to agree with the most users, and if they fail to respect the surfers' "licence agreements", they would be liable, just as ordinary surfers are when they break a site's license agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
Plaintiffs allege that (the defendant) has covertly, without consent or authorization, planted 'cookies' upon Internet users' computer hard disk drives and secretly tracked their movements across the Internet," the plaintiffs charged in a filing in Denver, Colo.
How can they do that? If the user has their browser set to accept cookies, and cookies get placed on their system, what is the problem with that? Seems like a case of people's ignorance, and instead of acknowledging that, they decide to sue someone instead.
BilldaCat
If an ethical plaintiff were involved, I'd give this story more credence.
sulli
RTFJ.
Technically, couldn't tracking be considered the same as cracking?
Why is it illegal for Joe Cracker to hack himself into a corp's website/intranet in order to get sensitive information while it's perfectly legal for that same corp to track the user's sensitive information?
I think that license agreement do too much for the big boys and not enough for the users. Wouldn't it be possible for a user to specify his own "license agreement", and then the sites could refuse/accept him as a viewer of that content? If such a mechanism could be put in place, the sites wouldn't have any choice but to agree with the most users, and if they fail to respect the surfers' "licence agreements", they would be liable, just as ordinary surfers are when they break a site's license agreement.
Just my 2 cents.
J:P
--- Worst tagline ever.