Detailed Privacy Study Finds Loopholes Galore 126
BrianWCarver writes "The San Francisco Business Times covers a study by student researchers at UC Berkeley's School of Information pointing up the massive holes in privacy policies and protections of which US companies take advantage. The researchers have released a study and launched a Web site, knowprivacy.org, in which they found that Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were placed on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 394,000 unique domains examined in the study. This larger data set was provided by the maintainer of the Firefox plugin Ghostery, which shows users which Web bugs are on the sites they visit. The study also found that while the privacy policies of many popular Web sites claim that the sites do not share information with third parties, they do allow third parties to place Web bugs on their sites (which collect this information directly, typically without users' knowledge) and share with corporate 'affiliates.' Bank of America, to take one extreme example, has more than 2,300 affiliates — and users cannot learn their identities. The full report and more findings are available from their Web site."
How Ironic... (Score:2, Interesting)
How ironic that a school without sufficient knowledge to protect its students from identity theft lectures the world on personal privacy.
A number of student Social Security numbers were leaked not too long ago.
Here's the article [yahoo.com]
bad analogy time (Score:1, Interesting)
So the hooker has a second customer behind the oneway mirror, and she's not "sharing" information about you because she doesn't supply notes with the second customer later?
Would this stand in court in the US? Presumably the lawyers who draft these statements base them on some sort of defensible argument.
Even Slash-dot now REQUIRES JS and sends Google JS (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe someone mentioned this. But I didn't see it in the threads yet.
This last week our very host SLASH_dot started REQUIRING JS for slashdot.org and fsdn.com in order to see any threads posted. AND fsdn "transfers information" from Google-Analytics while loading even the headlines page.
Obviously those of you who protest the slimiest of tactics are giving this site a pass when they do NOT deserve it. Slash-dot must be getting something including $ fro Google for the information they are stealing from us.
And Slash doesn't even say JS needed. All you get is a message "Error from upstream server" Unless you allow JS.
Disappointingly even adding google-analytics to my firewall block list does not seem to stop the "transfer of information" from google by fsdn. :(