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Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

wired.com

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Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#41

Post by angryasian »

sp332 wrote: post #22

KISSmetrics has a post explaining how the tracking works. http://www.kissmetrics.com/how-it-works They claim that simply using AdBlock is enough to defeat the tracking. They also claim "KISSmetrics has never, and will never, share anonymous customer activity of what people did on customer A’s site with customer B."

well the wired article directly contradicts what they say they are doing

"These services are using practically every known method to circumvent user attempts to protect their privacy (Cookies, Flash Cookies, HTML5, CSS, Cache Cookies/Etags…)"

They may not share information about specific users, but doesn't mean they don't use it to sell information in some aggregate form.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#42

Post by itg »

teej wrote: post #29
maukdaddy wrote: post #9

There is nothing more evil in modern business than marketers. Between real life experience and MBA classes I have come to despise most everything involved in modern marketing, especially in the technology space.

Give me a break. This isn't evil marketers hiding in their underground lair. This is web developers, designers, and product managers gaining insight about their users. They don't package this information and sell it wholesale to advertisers. They use it to make the product better . You are taking this -way- too seriously. The ability to have perfect information on how users interact with your product is one the earth…

Sure there is nothing wrong with that, but these are sneaky underhanded tactics. Users should be able to opt-out if they don't want to be tracked.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#43

Post by ______ »

Hisoka wrote: post #14

Doesn't this achieve the exact same purpose as logging a combination of the user's IP address + user-agent + maybe some other stuff? Don't need no complicated, cunning technology to do this...

Exactly. On http://panopticlick.eff.org/ you can see how 'unique' your browser configuration, ip address, language settings, etc are. For most people, this creates a great many bits of information that can be used to track you even without cookies or any client-side storage.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#44

Post by SoftwareMaven »

Hisoka wrote: post #14

Doesn't this achieve the exact same purpose as logging a combination of the user's IP address + user-agent + maybe some other stuff? Don't need no complicated, cunning technology to do this...

Except this can do it cross browser and when I move from hotspot to hotspot, too.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#45

Post by redthrowaway »

sp332 wrote: post #22

KISSmetrics has a post explaining how the tracking works. http://www.kissmetrics.com/how-it-works They claim that simply using AdBlock is enough to defeat the tracking. They also claim "KISSmetrics has never, and will never, share anonymous customer activity of what people did on customer A’s site with customer B."

>They claim that simply using AdBlock is enough to defeat the tracking

I'm highly suspicious of that claim. The only site I have whitelisted is reddit, and I found the i.kissmetrics.com cookie in with the rest. That's not to say reddit isn't using them, but I'd be surprised given their very cautious approach to advertising.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#46

Post by Groxx »

rjbond3rd wrote: post #27
pavpanchekha wrote: post #21

I tried to do my best figuring out what this cunning new method is, but the article seems to have no information. Is it just that it's using my browser's ETags cache? Also, what's with referring to ETags as a "theoretical technique never before seen in the wild"? It's pretty friggin standard.

The trick is the server generates a unique Etag for each visitor. Then the visitor's browser sends the Etag back to the server (in an "If-None-Match" header), and thus it acts as a quasi-cookie.

That's the picture I get too, but I don't see how clearing the cache doesn't, you know, clear the cache. It would seem to imply that if the Etag is still around, it's not really cleared - maybe the data is gone, but the knowledge that the data existed isn't. And it persists through privacy-mode.

Which means I/we am/are either misunderstanding something, or the people who designed privacy and cache-clearing tools had a massive blind-spot.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#47

Post by NoPiece »

sp332 wrote: post #19
RexRollman wrote: post #13

I usually use Firefox with it set to forget everything on exit, along with the Noscript plugin. Does anyone know if this tracking service would work on a FF user running Noscript? By the way, using Noscript has made me aware of something that I didn't previously know: many sites call Javascript from lots of other domains. I've seen websites with as many as 18 other domains listed on the Noscript pull down menu. And I…

All the social sharing buttons use 3rd-party JS. You can see the "embed" code for Google's new +1 button here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/1-button-... This lets the sites update APIs without breaking every page on the Internet :)

plus many sites use google's library api to load things like jquery! Used for good, 3rd party JS is a helpful thing.

http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/devguide.html

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#48

Post by jefft »

palish wrote: post #40
jefft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear: this ability isn't used to have perfect information on how users interact with your product. It's used to allow publishers to make more money from their consumers through advertising.

I think the reason you're being downvoted is because you didn't provide any proof.

Sites like Hulu and Spotify predominately use web analytics to gauge their audience in order to sell advertising, not to make their sites better. That may be a by-product, but that's not driving their analytics usage.

Additionally, cross-site tracking isn't used for feature/usage tracking. It's used for highly targeted advertising.

My point was the "shattering advantages" are really advantages for advertisers, not web designers.

This technique wasn't developed with web designers in mind, so let's be clear about that.

Re: Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged

#50

Post by mambodog »

code_duck wrote: post #15

Why single out Kiss Metrics? One example, I visited Fox News last month and found they set up an HTML5 database called, in a rather unsubtle choice, "evercookie". I can't confirm that this is the case currently, though since the ability to view HTML5 databases in Preferences seems to now be missing from all the browsers I have (which seems odd, too!).

I imagine it is named as such because they are using evercookie[1], off the shelf.

[1] http://samy.pl/evercookie/

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