How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the FTC On Privacy Issue 120
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."
from the dear-ftc-please-hire-people-like-this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Shocker (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What are "secret cookies"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Shocker (Score:3, Insightful)
When people stop wanting to consume corporate culture, then they are far freer from the fretters that come with it.
Re:Privacy assured... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What are "secret cookies"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Harm doesn't work like that. If it did, advertisers would be recognized as mass murderers, because they waste a few minutes of millions of people each day. If there are 300 millions people (let's take the US population) each of which watches 10 minutes of (unwanted) commercials each day, that is about 5704 people-years wasted every day. Divide that by a life expectancy of, say, 80 years, that is the equivalent of killing 71 people each day.
Let 'Harm' be the unit of harm. Turns out inflicting c/n Harm on n people is not the same as inflicting c Harm on 1 person.
Re:Privacy assured... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.