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HTML5 Draws Concern Over Risks To Privacy
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that in the next few years, HTML5 will provide a powerful new suite of capabilities to Web developers that could give marketers and advertisers access to many more details about computer users' online activities. The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user's hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data that could include a user's location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited. 'HTML5 opens Pandora's box of tracking in the Internet,' says Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum. Meanwhile Ian Jacobs, head of communications at the World Wide Web consortium, says the development process for HTML5 will include a public review. 'There is accountability,' Jacobs says. 'This is not a secret cabal for global adoption of these core standards.'"
Browsers are still going to be the ones in charge of that kind of storage, just like history, cookies and other current way's of tracking user information. It's just going to require users to CONTINUE being careful about their web usage. I don't see that anything is changing.
Article reads like it was written by someone who has no idea about the time and effort taken to sandbox sites from each other. Sounds like he's talking about LocalStorage or client side DBs, which can hold more data but are no more privacy risks than a single unique ID stored in a cookie linked to an unlimited REMOTE database. Accessing web history is not a part of HTML5, more FUD there, and browser vendors are working to block JS from being able to access that information. They also seem to refer to geolocation, which in Chrome at least has to be explicitly granted to sites unless you turn it on globally.
The "supercookie" thing is perhaps the one legitimate thing mentioned but browsers should (or probably will if they don't already) clear out most of those locations (except Flash, but you can't blame the browsers for that really) when you clear your private data, which at least Firefox and Chrome can do for you.
As for "buckets to put tracking information into" why bother relying on "buckets" on the client which may or may not exist, are limited in size, may change or be emptied at any time, etc, when you can buy as many "buckets" as you want server-side and store virtually unlimited data about them?
I think the fear is that this will contain exponentially more data than do HTTP cookies.
So, the actual news is that although we get new technology, old problems still aren't fixed?
The fact that with current technology all this data is already available doesn't mean that it does not need to be fixed in the future.
Didn't the 90s (And early 2000s) teach us anything? If HTML isn't implemented in essentially the same way across all browsers the Internet will stagnant again and we will turn to cross-platform plugins like Flash to actually get stuff done.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
i don't have a problem with a website seeing everything i do on that website. i have a problem with a website seeing what i do on other websites
let foo.com have evercookies on my computer about everything i do... at foo.com. not a problem. but i don't ever want foo.com too see what i do at fubar.com, and visa versa
of course, foo.com can sell my info to fubar.com through different channels, but that's a problem that predates the internet, and has nothing to do with browser privacy. and i know if doubleclick has their ads on foo.com, they can infer certain things about my activities at foo.com... actually, now that i think about it, that's a fatal hole in any browser privacy: if a webpage is serving content from another website, such as with advertising networks, we're pretty much doomed no matter what the markup language, aren't we?
to really have browser privacy, you'd have to destroy the entire possibility of webpages serving content from other domains. how the heck do you enforce that? a rule like "when loading content from foo.com, everything on this page must come from foo.com"? is that a viable concept? no more google analytics, no more iframes... i don't know, we're just doomed
but... even if you had that rule, foo.com could just agree with double click to proxy their ads, running them through their servers, so everything is coming from one domain, even though it really isn't. then they can simply see how one particular ip address walks across the web where they have similar agreements with other sites. no escape. you'd have to spoof your ip with every request, which breaks all sorts of functionality on most websites. maybe you could have a new ip for every tab, every session... what a nightmare
basically, the concept of privacy on the internet is void. if you type it on the web, it is known, end of discussion. crap
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Blocks all kinds of crap. Speeds up browsing, too. Even on Slashdot it blocks Google Analytics and something from demandbase.com.
Of course, you'll need lots of exception rules, but if you want to be aware of where your browser goes to get its files, it's well worth it.
They are, if you care. Most browsers allow you to disallow cookies, storage, etc, or clean them up periodically.
Most people don't care. No: most people want to be remembered by the sites for convenience, and they mostly definitively don't want to have to allow/disallow on a site by site basis.
The problem isn't technological, it's sociological.
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Genuine question - if people honestly don't care, then is it really a problem?
Is it that they don't care, or don't understand?
If people honestly don't understand the problem, then it's up to a government to protect the people, or up to the producer of a particular product to protect its customers (enforced by laws to protect the people).
Privacy is an abstract concept, which is difficult to understand for most people. Privacy for most people still means "to be able to close the curtains at night", and has nothing to do with the internet or any other digital technology.
> Being able to store things with flash is fine...
No it isn't. Creatures such as Flash should never be able to store or read anything. They should be locked in their sandboxes with only the input the browser chooses to give them.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What features does HTML5 include that let one server access any data other than that created by that server, or by the client user through the HTML GUI sent by that server? Why should any client state be available to the server, except the same kind of client-side feature list of supported media types and browser version that we've had since HTML1.0?
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What are you talking about? And who modded this insightful?
We're not talking about a civil rights issue, we're talking about an option you can turn on or off in your browser. It's not a problem for most people, so they don't turn it off. It's there to be turned off if you like. We're not even talking about getting rid of that option, we're just discussing sane defaults.
Can you give a decent explanation of how this relates to police brutality?
More and more sites just don't work if you enable strong privacy controls. Some of this seems to be deliberate, and it's getting worse.