Deeplinks Blog posts about Do Not Track
Last week Monica Chew, formerly of Mozilla, and Georgios Kontaxis, of Columbia University, published a paper detailing the proposed new Firefox Tracking Protection technology. With Tracking Protection enabled they found that they received 67.5% fewer cookies and reduced page load time by an astonishing 44% while browsing the Alexa top 200 news sites. Despite these impressive results, Tracking Protection remains deeply hidden in the browser's most obscure settings system, and is not on track to be offered even to Firefox's beta users for testing and improvement. We agree with Monica: Firefox needs to enable Tracking Protection—at least for users who enable Private Browsing mode—and make it an easy option in all cases.
Verizon told the New York Times on Friday that it plans to begin allowing its customers to opt out of its privacy-invasive header injection program. For customers that are aware of the Verizon program and visit the opt-out page, this means they will soon be able to protect themselves against privacy circumvention like Turn's zombie cookie.
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one's zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more.
Advertising network Turn announced today that they will suspend their zombie tracking cookie program. Turn was recently caught using Verizon Wireless' invasive UIDH header to undelete tracking cookies that web visitors had previously deleted. This unacceptable practice means that users who delete cookies to avoid Turn's and others' tracking will continue to be tracked against their will, using information associated with their previous activity through a permanent identity.
Research from Stanford's Jonathan Mayer and ProPublica has shown that Verizon's undeleteable UIDH mobile tracking header is being used by advertising and tracking company Turn.com to respawn deleted cookies. The only complete protection from being tracked by Verizon's injected headers is to follow the advice in Verizon's privacy policy, and not use their product at all:
If you do not want information to be collected for marketing purposes from services such as the Verizon Wireless Mobile Internet services, you should not use those particular services.
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