stating the obvious

Posted May 17, 2010 21:04 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: EFF: Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net

You know you have too much knowledge of a subject when you read an article like that and go "Yeah and this is new because?"

Fingerprinting a browser has been possible for a long long time (probably the late 1990's. I know that several web-trends programs from 2000 used various techniques to determine if an IP address was a singular or multiple browsers.. and looking at what they did one could see how to see if that 'browser' (or something very similar) showed up in other places without putting a special cookie on the browser. [A cookie makes it a definite 1:1 versus a guess.]

The fact is that most technology is not built for privacy and has never been. While we may think that we are quietly in our house and completely private, technology is built more like you have gone into common grounds. Unless you are willing to wear a burqa to cover yourself and deal with the extra scrutiny that gets from some quarters.. it is not a private action when you begin to communicate with anything outside of your computer. [And depending on some tools.. not even then :(.]

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stating the obvious

Posted May 17, 2010 23:49 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Just to add to that... I remember an interesting point that Lawrence Lessig made about privacy. It was along the lines of, in the real world, we're guaranteed a certain level of privacy because of the effort required to track us.

My trip to the city centre will expose me to thousands of people, but none would reliably draw a picture of me the next day. The security cameras in the bookshops will record what books I browsed, but, except in very exceptional circumstances, no one will watch the recordings with enough interest to see me or the books.

Online, the situation is put on its head. *I* can't remember what sites I viewed last week, but doubleclick.net has a pretty complete record of what I viewed last week, last month, last year, ...

stating the obvious

Posted May 18, 2010 0:23 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Actually people are not as anonymous when they are in the city center not even counting security cameras. Media organizations have long tracked buying habits.. any good grocer would know what kinds of vegetables you like if he wanted to keep in business. But since the 1970's and the growth of the credit industry it has become more of a part of society.

Going beyond the internet, a person's credit card/debit purchases, their magazine viewing, their TV habits are all stored and viewed away. We have lived in a society where privacy has become more of a fiction in the last 30+ years... we traded it away for cheap TV and t-shirts years ago. Scott McNeally's famous privacy quote was right in so many ways :/.