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."

Comments

from the dear-ftc-please-hire-people-like-this..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What are "secret cookies"?

[BitZtream]

You don't use a cookie.

You use an image and some nifty tricks to figure out if it was cached and long story short, you trick the browser into giving you info because of how it responds to cached documents.

This was on slashdot when the story originally came out with a much better description.

And I seem to recall that it was pretty clear at the time by looking at the java script that it was probably purely accidental rather than intentional.

Unfortunately, with CmdrTaco gone, sensationalizing of stories has shot up tremendously. You pretty much have to assume the summary is a lie now days. Not an error, an intentional lie.