Slashdot Mirror
Browser Spyware: Watching Where You Linger
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Just when you you'd installed Junkbuster and thought it was safe to go back onto the web, the BBC runs this story which tells you that webshites will soon(?) be able to tell whether you are reading the page, what parts of it are of interest to you, etc. Guess we can expect porn sites to be the first to take advantage of this." Or perhaps someone else is already doing this, and hasn't told you.
Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! HA! ha! ha! hA! ha! ha! HA! ha! ha! hic! ha! ha!
I've been doing exactly this for the last 6 years on my website...
Personally, if companies can direct moderate amounts of direct advertising to what I am interested in, I am ok with giving up a little bit of my privacy.
Plus, not to mention, the Internet is as public as Grand Central Station, or Central Park. People should have no reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet. If you want privacy, you should run your data through anonymity sites, or encrypt everything. Just like you would put confidential documents in a briefcase when going through a train station.
This kind of metrics tracking has been going on for a _long_ time. It's not like you need any special skills other then some cookie knowledge to pull this off.
-teknopurge
techienews network help us beta!!!
Website Hosting
So what?
sulli
RTFJ.
How did this get modded up? Isn't this obvious troll material.
Please, someone bounce it back down.
Now, getting to what the article actually says: I'm getting closer and closer to the opinion that we're in the middle of a war on privacy (to use a US-world-view phrase). It started out with the usual garbage about how companies needed to know how good their advertising was (to which I ask "why?").
But, this clearly crosses the line. No one needs to know that on a page with 7 stories, I spent more time looking at the one on penguins. There is no good excuse for this.