Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Mozilla , and even Microsoft want you to know they care about your Web privacy. These companies are taking steps to ensure that unwanted advertisers don’t track you, and they are winning acres of press coverage in the process.
Just one problem: “I don’t see these solutions working,” says Darren Hayes, a computer science professor at Pace University and a leading expert in computer forensics. “I just don’t see advertisers getting on board with this.”
The problem -- and it is huge -- is that we suddenly are in a lather about Websites tracking our movement on the Internet, with the result that we get barraged with targeted advertisements. Look at a travel site about Barbados, and for the next week likely you will be served ads offering deals and discounts in Barbados.
Huge cries have gone up about privacy lost, and the upshot has been a flurry of activity, both in Washington and in Silicon Valley.
Inside the Beltway, the lead is the Federal Trade Commission , which in December issued a report that, first, noted the volume of the uproar; second, said online companies weren’t doing enough to protect users’ privacy; and third, suggested that the way forward is to give users the choice to be tracked or not.
Now, by late January, the major browser developers have announced tools to help users prevent being tracked. The Internet Explorer tool is built into IE 9. Google’s tool for Chrome is here. Mozilla discusses its Firefox initiative here.
The three tools are wildly different. IE requires the user to populate a list of sites the user does not want tracking him or her.
To Continue Reading: Click Here
-------------------------------------------
Source: internetrevolution.com
By: Robert McGarvey
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment