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How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the FTC On Privacy Issue
Pigskin-Referee sends this excerpt from an article at ProPublica:
"Jonathan Mayer had a hunch. A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office, Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google."
What are "secret cookies"? Does anybody know what in the hell this means? Last I checked, cookies were plain text files stores in a specific place on a computer. How can a cookie be "secret"?
I don't respond to AC's.
from the dear-ftc-please-hire-people-like-this dept.
I doubt that the FTC would pay them well enough to make it worth their while.
The only way to ensure complete privacy is to stay offline and stay indoors. Oh, and probably keep all of your curtains closed too, now...
Why does chrome on windows phone home so often? I doubt that it is to check for updates, Once a day should be more than enough for that. Now that google is integrating all their services, what happens to the safebrowsing info that they must be collecting. Guess it goes into the pot too.
Always follow the money... do you think Google, or Facebook, or any other company that feeds itself on ad revenue really cares about your privacy? Their hard work is to find new ways to either take it from you or sell it to them for a new shiny widget. Is the big money from Google TV and Apple TV going to be selling low-margin boxes, or in selling your viewing habits?
You are not the customer. You have never been the customer. You're just the meat.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Unleash the "normal people won't care" crowd in 5...4...3...
You.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
If the annoying "gifted computer scientist" and "scooping the FTC" rhetoric is too much for you, the tone come from the Wired article.
The original post by the 'gifted' man is much more reasonable. Safari by default blocks third-party cookies (you can turn it off in the settings). This post explains how Google, and others, get around it. Quote, "if a cookie is sent with an HTTP request, Safari’s blocking policy will allow the response to write cookies." So when they load their iframe in the background, the first thing it does is a POST. If that doesn't make sense to you, the summary is Google used technical means to get around Safari's limitations. Here is Google's response.
Most hilarious, irrelevant, line from the article, "Earlier this year, it was revealed that Target realized a teenage customer was pregnant before her father knew; the firm identifies first-term pregnancies through, among other things, purchases of scent-free products."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"We could for sure do more if we had more people," says FTC official. "There are a lot of opportunities that we have to let go by because we don't have the people to seize them ... opportunities to measure and evaluate what's happening every day in people's computers and phones."
I don't want the FTC to have more people and monitor more people's computers and phones. I trust them far less than I trust Google, since the scope for abuse is so much higher. I don't recall Google ever imprisoning or shooting someone for violations of their TOS...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Now get lost !!
Google's worst is better than Facebook's best. Hell, Facebook has gotten caught hiring PR agents to smear google in the past. Who's to say they aren't doing that now with this?
It would be news if the FTC discovered this and it wasn't about devices that use Apple's Safari.
WHAT! An advertising company acting in self interest by tracking?! Impossible! This guy forgot to take his pill. Now everyone, take their pills.
All joking aside, I wonder if privacy is dead now. Please say it isn't I don't want to have to browse every site through 7 proxies. Please reply for good ideas on keeping privacy. I don't even want to touch G+ or FB anymore... I don't want them to have more info on me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
Directly relevant to this topic, if you use Firefox, try installing the Mozilla add-on Ghostery and monitor the little ghost icon which display a number greater than zero whenever the current web page contains one or more trackers.
If you've never seen it before, it's quite eye-opening how virtually every site contains trackers these days, some sites using large numbers of them. Ghostery blocks every tracker unless told not to, but even if you don't want them blocked, it can be interesting to monitor them and watch how they interact with NoScript.
Good add-on. I wonder whether Chrome and Chromium provide anything equivalent.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
How dare anyone criticize /.'s ordained non-evil multinational! It was just an accident, duh. Google doesn't do anything unethical. And even if it was slightly unethical, you gave up your privacy when you joined the web. It's kinda like how you basically lose all consititutional rights when you enter an airport. It's just the price of progress, guys!
How dare anyone criticize /.'s ordained non-evil multinational! It was just an accident, duh. Google doesn't do anything unethical. And even if it was slightly unethical, you gave up your privacy when you joined the web. It's kinda like how you basically lose all consititutional rights when you enter an airport. It's just the price of progress, guys!
How do you think google is able to have the bowser on your phone, computer and tablet sync the open taps and pre-fetch all the entries in each instances history? Chrome definitely records every webpage you look at and sends it to google.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Could have already told him that. Not much of a discovery.
Also, despite pop-up blocking turned on in my browsers many sites still manage to do it. Gee....look at me I'm a gifted computer scientist because I figured out that advertisers have managed to get around that as well.
The trend will be very hard to stop.
As more and more industrial and technology jobs shift to offshore locations, there will nothing left in the continental US other than retail, services, services to retail, services to services, and etc. Ultra-specialized advertising services will make up a considerable chunk of the new service-oriented economy. Soon there will be only two major service classes: those who flip burgers and those who statistically analyze the flippers.
I think we can say that Google is in fact an evil corp now. Or how many more times must it be proven that are in face Evil.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Believe it or not, there are many people that do work for work's sake and because it presents itself as a challenge. It's not just about the money.
we just need a law that makes companies criminally liable for unauthorized access to personal information, and to have "personal information" classified as anything that can uniquely identify an individual to the point of being able to predict behavior or identify the user as a member of a specific class.
once the liability outweighs the profit companies will stop doing this kind of shit.
Nobody will work for any government agency for $40K / year unless it can't be helped.
It's just not worth it considering the bureaucracy you have to deal with.
After all, Google Does No Evil (TM)
What is it doing here?
Most people don't want to understand how their device works. Nor should they have to. To most people all cookies are hidden because most people don't know what they are, other than occasionally being told they have to allow them for a site to work. And most people don't want to know what they are. They just want their device to work. Most people are not slashdotters. So even pointing them to a web site explaining how to keep everything private is a waste of time. If there is any term that they don't know and is perceived to be computer geekish, their eyes will glaze over and they'll switch back to facebook or twitter... or watching cute kittens dry humping the dog or something equally adorable. Your sentiment is good, but ultimately pointless.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Every two months when Safari stops allowing third party cookies when the user disables third party cookies.
Don't fear advertisers, fear governments and ISPs. Advertisers are collecting a limited set of your interests in the hopes that you'll be interested in purchasing something; that "personal information" you seem to care so much about is translated into a demographic comprised of keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with you individually; they aren't tracking you, they're tracking a virtual set of tags that you don't own. And, on top of that, the value of this information is questionable. The bit about Google "knowing" that a girl was pregnant before her father, based on her buying trends-- Google didn't "know", it guessed, based on an algorithm, and algorithm's don't care about you. Right now, it thinks I want a new phone, but guess what, I don't! I agree that there should be clearly defined limits on what information advertisers are able to collect, but "no track" options potentially cripple a multi-billion dollar business that funds the free Web.
On unique fingerprints for browsers and the tracking thereof.
Each browser has a unique set of information routinely passed back to web servers.
Marketeers use a hash of that information to identify and track us as we skip merrily from site to site about the web.
Is there a simple way to twiddle that browser information to generate a new unique hash every time we go to another site?
It needs to be easy for us to do and hard for the servers to adapt to.
The only reason real fingerprints are used for identification is that they don't change.
Just asking.