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Detailed Privacy Study Finds Loopholes Galore

Posted by kdawson on from the get-over-it dept.

BrianWCarver writes "The San Francisco Business Times covers a study by student researchers at UC Berkeley's School of Information pointing up the massive holes in privacy policies and protections of which US companies take advantage. The researchers have released a study and launched a Web site, knowprivacy.org, in which they found that Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were placed on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 394,000 unique domains examined in the study. This larger data set was provided by the maintainer of the Firefox plugin Ghostery, which shows users which Web bugs are on the sites they visit. The study also found that while the privacy policies of many popular Web sites claim that the sites do not share information with third parties, they do allow third parties to place Web bugs on their sites (which collect this information directly, typically without users' knowledge) and share with corporate 'affiliates.' Bank of America, to take one extreme example, has more than 2,300 affiliates — and users cannot learn their identities. The full report and more findings are available from their Web site."

4 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. We need to take care of our privacy. by Krneki · · Score: 5, Informative

    NoScript can stop most of the scripts running in the background when you visit a web page.
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

    --
    Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
    1. Re:We need to take care of our privacy. by AnalPerfume · · Score: 4, Informative

      A decent cookie policy helps too. CSS Lite along with a "deny all cookies" default works wonders in that regard. Then just like NoScript you van allow them temporarily or permanently on an individual basis when a site you need demands them.

    2. Re:We need to take care of our privacy. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      1) Use adblock pro and it will whack most of those 2) You can enable sites one by one if you need OpenID, ReCAPTCHA, etc 3) This part is true :(

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      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Even whitehouse.gov has a web bug by karl.auerbach · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even the Whitehouse.gov website has a 1x1 pixel web bug that is in violation of their own privacy policy, not to mention 5 USC 552a.