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

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

#131

Post by sixtofour »

jaredmck wrote: post #100
zedshaw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. If it was used to improve a product, they wouldn't use a tracking method that tracks me between sites. They can track what I do on their site, but if I'm going from goat-sucking-maggot.com to hulu.com, then Hulu has no business knowing that and knowing that doesn't improve their damn product. This is entirely just an attempt to get competitive analysis about their competitors at the expense of user privacy.

Since when have users been entitled to privacy? It's just more obvious now when user data is collected, and things move much faster so it's on a more tangible scale. Small town gossip was used in much the same way to gain competitive edges at the expense of customer privacy, it just wasn't as easy to see/prove how the data moved from one spot to another back in the days of pre-electronic commerce.

Users can demand privacy. It's not a given who has rights to what, privacy or data.

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

#132

Post by khuey »

robtoo wrote: post #107
rjbond3rd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many other techniques employed. As soon as one of the techniques works, it re-populates the others. (Cache clearing doesn't affect Flash cookies [LSO's]).

Cache clearing doesn't affect Flash cookies [LSO's] This is coming soon to a Chrome near you: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/04/providing-transparency-and-... Presumably other browsers will follow.

It's already shipping in some:

http://blog.sidstamm.com/2011/05/clearing-flash-cookies-usin...

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

#133

Post by sixtofour »

thehotdon wrote: post #71
teej wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Marketers do nothing to "make the product better". They pump exorbitant amounts of money into advertising, thereby increasing the final price paid by customers without increasing product quality. Furthermore, they use these advertisements to inflate their customers' perceived value of the products, once again, without actually increasing product quality. Marketers maximize profits, not quality.

If a product is crappy, no one will see the advertisements. If a product is great, people will use it, and see.

Google is nothing but an advertising company, yet 99+% of us only ever see them as a search, email, blogging, and cloud docs company. A huge number of us use their products, because they're good products. As their products improve, their cash accumulates.

I've never been in a Google meeting, but I suppose Google's marketers have some input into product development; at Google, that input is probably based on data.

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

#134

Post by sixtofour »

driverdan wrote: post #80
losvedir wrote: post #73

I generally browse with Javascript, cookies, and plug-ins off (except for a few whitelisted sites). From what I understand of the technology (it loads some javascripts initially), I think that would dodge it.

What's it like living in 1994?

The counter might be, what's it like living in 1984?

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

#136

Post by sixtofour »

jscheel wrote: post #38

Jeez guys, not all tracking is evil. You know all that awesome content that exists on the web? Well the people that make and distribute that content need information to make your experience better. Let's say you start a new site. Let's use 8tracks for example: they provide a two-tiered service, one free and premium. The free service exists to drive you to a paid account, but you still derive value from it, nonetheles…

There was a TV executive a few years ago who stated that getting up to go to the bathroom during a commercial is theft.

It's the commercials that make non-premium TV possible in its current free-ish structure. It seems that broadcasters should run their business with the assumption that a certain number of people are going to go the the bathroom and miss some commercials. And web companies should run their businesses and still be able to provide their free-ish services if some people decide to opt out of tracking.

What if everyone went to the bathroom all the time and missed all the commercials? That doesn't seem to happen.

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

#137

Post by joeshaw »

thezilch wrote: post #52

I'm not sure these researchers understand how private-browsing functions. The session in a private-browsing window is only private from the non-private sessions and only private from future private-sessions when all private sessions -- private-browsing windows -- are destroyed. http://imgur.com/a/LjjYf Here I have a non-private session, where I have request i.js (a second time), invoking an If-None-Match check with m…

The main exceptions to this are Flash cookies. These are shared between all browsers for a given user, since they're stored by the Flash plugin itself and independent of individual browsers' profile storage.

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

#138

Post by klbarry »

thehotdon wrote: post #71
teej wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Marketers do nothing to "make the product better". They pump exorbitant amounts of money into advertising, thereby increasing the final price paid by customers without increasing product quality. Furthermore, they use these advertisements to inflate their customers' perceived value of the products, once again, without actually increasing product quality. Marketers maximize profits, not quality.

Value does not exist except as what the customer perceives value to be.

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

#139

Post by klbarry »

scythe wrote: post #39
jscheel wrote: post #38

Jeez guys, not all tracking is evil. You know all that awesome content that exists on the web? Well the people that make and distribute that content need information to make your experience better. Let's say you start a new site. Let's use 8tracks for example: they provide a two-tiered service, one free and premium. The free service exists to drive you to a paid account, but you still derive value from it, nonetheles…

>not all tracking is evil. Tracking isn't evil. Tracking people who specifically do not want to be tracked is evil.

What if I specifically don't want you on my website if you won't let me track you? You're using technology to circumvent me (adblock), why can't I use technology to circumvent your wishes (evercookie et. al.)?

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

#140

Post by ZoFreX »

braindead_in wrote: post #84

What's the cunning part? I skimmed the article and it seemed to have everything other then the technique.

It's talking about two separate issues which initially confused me, one of which is inappropriate data sharing.

The cunning part technically is their repurposing of "etags". These aren't that widely known about but it's a mechanism by which you can ask a webserver "I've already downloaded this file before, has it changed?". Typically the etag will be a revision number, or a hash of the file. The header to create one looks like this:

ETag: "686897696a7c876b7e"

And then in future requests your browser will include the header:

If-None-Match: "686897696a7c876b7e"

In the request. If the file hasn't changed since you last downloaded it, you get a 304 Not Modified. Given that you can store absolutely arbitrary data in the ETag, it's easy to see how this can be used to track users (and the same applies to the Last-Modified header, which is treated exactly like an ETag by your browser despite containing a date).

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