Advertising Network Caught History Stealing

jonathanmayer writes "Last week the Stanford Security Lab reported some surprising results on how advertising networks respond to opt outs and Do Not Track. This week we made a new discovery in the online advertising ecosystem: Epic Marketplace, a member of the self-regulatory Network Advertising Initiative, is history stealing with unprecedented scale and sophistication. And Epic is snooping some remarkably sensitive information, including pages from the FTC, IRS, NIH, Mayo Clinic, and more. Epic has written a response defending its practices."

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Re:Adsense

[zget]

As someone else here commented, Google has been changing rapidly recently: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2339084&cid=36825878

I also was able to meet with some (middle management) people at Google and their attitude reminded me very strongly of MS's behavior 15 years ago: They don't listen to what others say and what they say often implies: "We're the smartest people on the planet, the world revolves around us, if you don't want to work with us and use our stuff, you're just an idiot." So it think I can conclude that Google sees themselves as "winning" the way that MS saw themselves winning in the late 90's.

You can see the same change with all the "privacy is not important" and the recent Google+ product. I think we are really seeing a turning point here. Google has finally passed the point where it has, after a long time, accepted it's not the small geeky company it once was and is now just driving for profits. The scary thing is, they have got in a great position to exploit that now.

It is human tendency to abuse their position. It doesn't even have to be Google as large - there are stories of their employees going thru peoples emails and histories and pasting them to when IM'ing with them. That's why you have security in your own systems, so that people can't abuse it. That's why you also don't give everything to single entity. Google is starting to be the same monopoly that Microsoft was during the 90's, but this time it's also privacy losing.