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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.
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.
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."
Why do people keep pushing these ridiculous false dichotomies? Nobody is saying that we should all be isolated, secretive hermits who keep everything we do secret from everyone else. The problem is that we have these companies amassing vast amounts of information on people, with horribly inadequate limitations on how that information can be used, how long it can stored, or what should be done if a person objects to the storage of that information. It is clear that these companies do not really respect the wishes of their users to not be tracked, because they are using these sorts of tricks to evade browser settings.
If you think there is no difference between people in my town knowing who I am dating and a company like Google keeping track of everything I read, watch, purchase, and say, then you are not paying attention. We are not talking about gossip here, we are talking about companies amassing power over everyone (by collecting information) without any check on that power.
Palm trees and 8
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
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
Really? The Google paranoia is pretty heavy around here and is completely unnecessary. If you're not going to bother to become informed, you should avoid telling the world how uninformed you are.
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.
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.
Or in other words, the analogy here is not that we're trying to isolate ourselves from casual observation, but rather that we're trying to fight back against a stalker.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It should be proven at least once. This article is terrible. It refers to a non-issue as a "major privacy scandal" and talks about google "secretly" doing something that was such a good secret that Google didn't even know about it. The writer just doesn't have a good understanding of the issues, or he/she is intentionally misstating them to be alarmist. Either way, though, there was nothing evil about what Google did in either "scandal". Google was indeed subverting Safari's privacy settings to set a Cookie, but it was an OPT-IN cookie. Apple was blocking Google from doing something that Google's users wanted done, and Google used a work-around and then apologized for it and stopped when people freaked out even though it was totally a non-issue.
The thing is, this is like the 19th time we've rehashed this issue on Slashdot. Periodically there will be a new article about it, and it will inevitably get posted on Slashdot and I'm pretty sure at least a certain percentage of readers assume its a new thing, and not just a discussion about something we've already discussed a dozen times or more.
It wasn't a big deal then, it's not a big deal. This article is just more shrilly alarmist in its language choice than others. I can't tell if that's a product of not truly understanding the issues or just a lack of integrity on the part of the writer.
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.