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FTC Reportedly Fining Google $22.5 Million Over Safari Privacy Abuse
New submitter Slashbots writes "Google will settle with the FTC for nearly $22.5 million over its bypassing of Apple's Safari browser privacy settings. It would be the largest settlement with the FTC over privacy-related charges ever. By abusing a privacy hole in Safari, Google circumvented user settings to show them advertising and track the user. 'Safari, unlike other browsers, blocks cookies from ad networks like Google's. But because of a loophole, Google had been able to avoid the block, as researchers discovered in February. It installed cookies and tracked Safari users across the Web to show them personalized ads.'"
This thing of "We do something illegal, you fine us, everyone's happy" must stop. Somebody must serve some nice jail time (not much, say 6-12 months) and then maybe such fucked up practices would diminish.
This is like me breaking into someone's house, pissing and shitting all over the place, then paying a 5 dollar fine for doing so. Would that stop me in the future? Hell no.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
... like most corporate fines, the number seems absurdly low. $22.5 million is about 0.06% (not 6%, 0.06%, six hundredths of a percent) of Google's 2011 revenue. This would be equivalent to fining the average person about twenty bucks, which isn't much of a deterrent when there's serious money to be made by breaking the rules. Until fines for these kinds of violations at least come close to matching the potential profit, the behavior isn't going to change.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The EPA already attempts to do this using what has been termed the "designated felon".
The idea is that if there are severe environmental damages, the company has to have someone designated as the person that will do jail time. The idea is that this person is in charge of setting and enforcing the policies that will keep her out of jail.
It even allows someone that violates the policies to be the one that serves jail time. In other words, the DF says "you must do this", and if you ignore that, you do the time.
However, this isn't enforced as much as it should be, and I'm not aware of any other use of this idea outside EPA regulations.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
it is supposed to and Google gets fined? Shouldn't Apple also get fined? Submitting hidden forms is not an unknown concept in web development. Its not like Google hacked the users computer and changed the Safari settings. The settings were broken if they didn't block this. I'm not saying I agree with what Google was doing, I just think there were some serious issues with Safari's privacy settings if they allowed this in the first place.
I also don't think Google is the only company doing this. I actually had an interview with an ad company a few months back where they actually bragged about how they could track Safari users despite the default privacy settings. I never followed up on it, but I'd imagine it is something similar. I didn't take the job (for other reasons).
No. It wasn't any sort of active attempt at hacking. It wasn't breaking any encryption. Even the EFF admits it was probably unintended.
Saying Google "used a loophole" is just a loaded way of saying Safari had a bug. The technique had been known for at least two years, and was used by companies other than Google.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This article has an interesting writeup of what happened, for those who are interested in the details.
question is, why aren't they fining anyone else who did this? Google is not the only one. I suppose nobody realized Microsoft made the complaint while doing it themselves along with facebook?
So remember when you get excited about things like:
The manifesto, obtained yesterday by BuzzFeed, is titled "The Technology Revolution" and lays out an argument — in doomsday tones —for keeping the government entirely out of regulating anything online, and for leaving the private sector to shape the new online space.
You need to consider this story and how the private sector will abuse privacy left and right if it drives up revenues. With not even a public slap on the wrist from the government, you are faced with individuals playing a PR campaign against massive corporations. That rarely ends well for the individuals and the users.
My work here is dung.
The DMCA only applies to security measures intended to restrict access to copyright-protected works. It doesn't apply to security in general.
So, how large of a fine is Facebook going to pay?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
> The thing was, Google was already under an FCC settlement because of violating privacy policies in the past
Uh huh. And so is Facebook:
http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0923184/111129facebookagree.pdf
-- Don't Tase me, bro!