We’re all celebs for sure. Our life, now mirrored on the internet, is a public affair. Or so Google thought. It seems to have landed in another soup for circumventing a security setting on the Safari browser for iphones and ipads.
Jonathan Mayer of Stanford University’s Security Lab, and the Center for Internet and Society, released a study that claimed that Google was able to go past the “third-party cookie blocking” privacy feature without interaction with the user.
The Study says – “Some companies track the cookies generated by the websites you visit, so they can gather and sell information about your web activity. Safari is the first browser that blocks these tracking cookies by default, better protecting your privacy. Safari accepts cookies only from the current domain.”
That said, the Safari cookie blocking is not as rigid as some of the other browsers and there are a few cases where the browser allows third party cookies to be ‘let in’. It is a very exhaustive read and technical in nature but has a nice enough Conclusion at the end where this interplay between third-party web trackers and browser privacy measures is likened to the ‘Arms Race’. In the end, janta loses.
Read more @ consumerwatchdog.org
And that is what Google has been circumventing. There was a good piece on CNN this morning that looks at it from several perspectives. So far newspapers are the only ones who seem to have posted it--optimized press release, perhaps?
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ReplyDeleteCookie blocking is not going to take people very further in the Social Media world. On Facebook you can not even log in if you block cookies. That is their business and if people chose to be there they are going to have to play by their rules.
ReplyDeleteYou're right Debora. The problem is that not many people would really care even though they might be principally against being tracked. And THAT is my worry. Cause you won't the complete rapport of info tracking or how deep it will go until it blows up on a lazy Tuesday and finally hits the fan.
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ReplyDeleteMany things are possible with technology. The value of the Internet industry is mainly coming from the data the firms are able to get easily.
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