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OMB: Federal policy on web cookies changing
Online 'Cookies' Crumble Under Tougher Fed Guidelines, by Chris Strohm, Tech Daily Dose (June 25, 2010). An OMB spokesman said that the federal government is issuing new policies today governing how agencies may use Web "cookie" files and other technologies to collect information from visitors to government Websites. Continue reading
OMB removes datasets from data.gov
White House bars agencies from posting some statistics, by Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (01/27/2010). According to this article, datasets posted to data.gov by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Peace Corps, the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation, and the Social Security Administration have been removed by the Office of Management and Budget "because they raised privacy, security or other concerns." The article is based on work done by OpenTheGovernment.org which is tracking agency participation with the Open Government Directive here. Continue reading
Privacy of the e-book?
This year will probably be remembered (among other things!) as the year of the e-book-reader device hype. We've seen new Kindles, the B&N Nook, the FBReader, applications for book reading on iPhones and other handheld devices, and more. And, of course, there is the elephant-in-the-room of the Google book scanning project. (I find it so odd that so much of the popular press refers to the Google "Library" when it is clearly a Google book store.) It will be a while before we know if the digital age will turn into the end of sharable books (see: Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books), but we certainly should be tracking the development of the advantages and disadvantages of e-books and e-book readers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping us track how these developments affect privacy:
- An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, Commentary by Ed Bayley.
EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy. We've examined the privacy policies for the major e-readers on the market to determine what information they reserve the right to collect and share.Continue reading
Private-Sector Privacy Problems: gmail edition
In Google we trust? Think again, by Joe Newman, Public Citizen (October 21, 2009).
A Gmail user who did nothing wrong had his or her account shut down because of [a] bank’s monumental screw up. And Google, a company that basically prints its own cash, didn’t lift a finger to protect the rights of one of its users.Continue reading
Privacy: Flash video has its own cookies, even at the Whitehouse
A group of researchers has released a report on 'Flash cookies' -- persistent identifiers used by popular Adobe Flash presentations on the web.
- Soltani, Ashkan, Canty, Shannon, Mayo, Quentin, Thomas, Lauren and Hoofnagle, Chris Jay, Flash Cookies and Privacy (August 10, 2009).
This is a pilot study of the use of 'Flash cookies' by popular websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are using flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are using it to 'respawn' or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and are even used on government websites to assign unique values to users. Privacy policies rarely disclose the presence of Flash cookies, and user controls for effectuating privacy preferences are lacking.For advertisers and others who want to track user behavior, the ability of users to control, block, and delete traditional HTTP cookies is a problem. The authors quote one company as saying that while all advertisers use HTTP cookies for targeted advertising, "cookies are under attack." That same company announced that it had, "developed a backup ID system for cookies set by web sites, ad networks and advertisers, but increasingly deleted by users.... [These cookies] cannot be deleted by any commercially available anti- spyware, mal-ware, or adware removal program. They will even function at the default security setting for Internet Explorer." See also:
- You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again, By Ryan Singel, Wired (August 10, 2009).
- Local Shared Object Wikipedia.
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