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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?
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.
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.
> 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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make install -not war