Slashdot Mirror
Google and Apple Weaseling Out of "Do Not Track"
An anonymous reader writes "Per an op-ed in today's New York Times, Google, Apple, and others would be effectively exempt from "Do not track": "[T]he rules would allow the largest Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as Facebook's 'Like' button or an embedded YouTube video. This giant loophole would make 'Do Not Track' meaningless."
Weaseling out of things is what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel...
"A study commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau with researchers from Harvard Business School underscores the point: at least half of the Internet’s economic value is based on the collection of individual user data, and nearly all commercial content on the Internet relies on advertising to some extent. Digital advertising grew to a $42.8 billion business last year, a sum that already exceeds spending on broadcast television advertising."
One way or another, you pay for your free Internet services.
This matters because if two of the biggest tracking companies have openly decided that they will not listen to users who ask not to be tracked, then there is no longer any wiggle-room left where they can claim any moral arguments in this war, even to the layperson. They have effectively just doubled-down and escalated the arms race between them and ad blockers/anonymizing services by not even making a token empty promise to honor their user's desires.
I don't mean to sound glib but, of course they are!
Both company's entire business models are 100% predicated on tracking people. Facebook has a $200B market valuation based on nothing but tracking the ever-living-shit out of as many people as they possibly can. Two hundred billion fucking dollars! There is simply no way these companies will ever agree to not track anyone when there is that kind of money on the line. For that kind of money they will murder people before they give up tracking. That is "invade a foreign country" levels of money on the line. All those people who thought GM conspired to kill the electric car 20 years ago, this is easily 10x more than that.
For one thing, "Do Not Track" has never meant the same thing to the Big Data companies as it has to the layman. In practice Do Not Track really means "do not remind me you are tracking me by showing me obvious clues like ads for shit I already bought last week." But they still track people and build up profiles that they sell/rent to other companies who use it more subtley like estimating your income, race, age, politics, family relations, arrest records, etc and that all goes into thinks like background/credit reports etc. Plus they also wait for the second you accidentally do give them permission and then all those years worth of tracking data in a "ghost profile" gets officially attached to your profile and they start showing you ads for shit you already own.
You are obviously clueless. The issue is cross-domain tracking, as in where someone uses one of the FB, Goog, or other 'widgets' or advertising integrations on their own site...
Don't go to sites that use FB widgets. Use Ghostery or a number of other tools. If you are being tracked, it's because you *allow* it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm a big fan of Privacy Badger, mainly because it can automatically block trackers based on behavior rather than having to rely on someone's premade block list.
https://www.eff.org/privacybad...
The same folks provide HTTPS Everywhere, another must-have.
https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-EVER...
"Do not do anything that you don't want to see on the front page of the New York Times", has included "or Google searches" for quite some time.
Assume there are no secrets on the Internet; any other expectation is unrealistically optimistic.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"Do Not Track" never meant anything at all. It's the equivalent of a "Please be nice to me" button.
We need technical solutions to make fingerprinting harder/impossible. Especially the canvas/font techniques.
meep
Did anyone actually believe that the do-not-track flag was effective? There is pretty much no way it can be enforced and the companies can do whatever they want in most cases. E.g. Facebook does not honor it outright, most advertising networks ignore it as well. It was only a silly boondoggle to quickly placate the regulator/lawmakers by showing that the self-regulation in the advertising industry actually "works" and thus no heavy-handed regulation is necessary. That flag is completely useless otherwise.
If you want some semblance of privacy from the pervasive tracking, you must use a solution that is completely under your control - i.e. ad blockers, NoScript, Ghostery, block Flash, etc. and not something that relies on the good will of the advertiser that they will obey some silly flag.
If you are being tracked, it's because you *allow* it.
Wrong.
It is because you don't prevent it. At least legally, that is a very big difference. If I allow you to hit me in the face, e.g. by participating in a boxing match, then I can't later sue you for bodily harm. If you do it without my permission and I just fail to prevent it, then all the guilt falls on you anyway and I can sue you, plus you have committed a crime. That's quite a big difference there between those two words.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org