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Detailed Privacy Study Finds Loopholes Galore
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."
Agreed. Trackers such as Google Analytics and more have been around for years. But now it's getting even worse with the flurry of URL shorteners. Not only can't you see what the real URL points to, its main purpose is to track, track, track.
Personally, I don't believe it makes sense to have a web completely free of "web bugs". I'd rather have some pretty strong laws, along the lines of the presumption of innocence, so that anything collected about you can't possibly be used against you if it was obtained "by chance". That would be a start.
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escape the corporate world, code for fun and profit
The law: this is the thing that really deserves this tag.
Defective by design, my friends. You have no privacy from the powerful.
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Toro
What the fuck did you expect? If you want "privacy", stay home. Oh, wait.
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.
Why do we keep having studies like this? It's like having more studies to prove that gravity will cause a rock to drop on the ground; it's pretty well understood without having to have yet another study remind us that given even the slightest chance to lie, cheat or steal, corporations will willingly and vigorously lie, cheat and steal.
While I'm not "old" I am, at 42, at the point where I just tune out anything a corporation tells me. It's all bullshit. All of it. And I often ask myself why I don't make every attempt to rip them off as often and as completely as I can -- just fuck off being honest, all you get is ripped off anyway. There is no "fair" or "middle ground", it's just "how badly do you want to get lied to/cheated/ripped off?"
In spite of this and in spite of my equally strong cynicism that government can "fix" this, why don't we treat these corporate fucks properly?
For so many of these frauds, jail just isn't good enough, or it doesn't provide the right life lesson. These people need to know just exactly what the shit end of the stick feels like. Here's a suitable punishment for corporate malfeasance:
1) Corporate thief *and* immediate family, including wives divorced after the initiation of fraud, stripped of ALL personal possessions, property, real estate and financial assets. YOU MAY NOT EVER PROFIT FROM YOUR CRIME NOR ENRICH YOUR FAMILY. YOU HAVE LOST EVERYTHING. FOREVER.
2) Forced to live a residence in a neighborhood with at least 50% of the population at or below the poverty line. POVERTY SUCKS.
3) All family members required to work at a job which pays no more than 2x the poverty wage for whatever size family they consist. Any money earned over this amount is forfeited. YOU WILL NEVER GET AHEAD OR EVEN CATCH UP.
4) No financial or material support of any kind from the outside, including support in-kind (free rent, forgiven debt, etc). AND NOBODY WILL HELP.
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.
ADVERTISERS are Anti-Privacy People!!! They would create massive databases tracking every single man woman and child on the planet if they could and many are still working on that very thing.
Google is an advertiser. When you break it down, Google's motivation is making money by selling advertisements in various forms and means.
Here's other news: Advertising WORKS!!! They wouldn't do all this if it didn't yield results. And that will never change. Our consumer culture is so developed that people can't imagine any other way of seeing the world they live in.
And here's an interesting aside -- according to my younger brother who recently went through law enforcement training informed the family of an interesting bit of trivia. He told us that the code word for "mentally retarded person" is "CONSUMER." He was not joking. Let that settle in... There are so many different areas where "consumer" is used to describe people and it makes you think doesn't it? We're all the brainless pawns in their business strategies and plans.
Those are excellent points.
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See, the problem is that my privacy is none of your business. I don't care what you think is acceptable to me. Speak for yourself.
If a surfer visits your site, they have a certain expectation of viewing your content. Now you've decided to share that two-way communication with a hidden third party, who offers you a service (so far so good) in exchange for access to the visitors (that's the problem). Your visitors have not entered into any relationship with the third party, and are not getting any service from them. So why are you letting them get milked?
Think of it this way: Do you carry a hidden tape recorder in your pocket so that you can record all your conversations with your friends and colleagues, just because the weird guy down the street is paying you 10 bucks a week to let him listen in on anything he likes? Would you consider that acceptable behaviour from any of your friends and colleagues?
"Do people have a right to complain if they aren't willing to lift a finger to protect themselves?"
Why yes, yes they do.
Ghostery found 1 web bug on Slashdot
My ism, it's full of beliefs.