The end of online privacy ?
If Ottawa thinks the census is invasive, what about the 64 trackers that popular websites install on visitors’ computers?
An interesting article from the Globe and Mail a few Saturday’s ago. More interesting were the comments on this article. They ranged from political jabs at Harper to security advice on browsers, cookies, etc. All valid… even the jabs at Harper ! One piece of advice I would add to businesses would be to ensure you have a web usage policy in place as well as the technology to help you inforce this policy… an ounce of prevetion… as the saying goes.
Here is the rest of the article…
In January of this year, researchers at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation tried an experiment. The online privacy advocacy group set up a Web page, and collected and stored the browser information of everyone who visited it.
There were no tricks. The site would not steal any data or urge casual visitors to install tracking software. It would simply log the same basic information almost all Internet users in the world inadvertently hand over each time they visit a website, including their time zone and Internet-protocol (IP) address – important clues to their location.
The most alarming result of the study of more than 470,000 Web surfers is that 83.6 per cent of them had an instantly identifiable, totally unique fingerprint: Their particular combination of settings and information was unlike that of any other user, increasing the chance they could be personally identified, even though they had done nothing but make a few clicks of the mouse.
