Saturday
Nov 22nd
| Big Brother Now Eats Cookies |
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| Written by John McCarthy Director LeadSure | |||||||
Page 4 of 5 Privacy "We have zero privacy anyway" Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems. Perhaps a little extreme, we are not all tracked by satellites. We do though guard our privacy as fundamental human right. Yet the Internet does not afford this luxury. Should we be concerned? Has Big Brother finally entered our lives through TCP/IP? "Cookies cannot steal information" Lincoln Stein, (World Wide Web Consortium). They only store references to information you have provided or sites you have visited, they cannot read your hard drive. It is easy to overreact to cookies to say they are the spies on the hard drive. They have both positive and negative aspects. We will look later at safeguards that can be put in place to protect us from cookies. Other Means of Tracking Us Cookies though are not the only means of determining our habits on the Internet. We all connect to the Internet no doubt through an ISP. Our experience so far as Network managers has taught us that if we have root access on a server we have full rights to all files on the computer. Our ISP's therefore have root access to all our accounts; they know where we have been on the Internet and for how long. There are programs that can be used to gather this information automatically and collate it. This leads to another important question, Do you know your ISP's policy on giving this information to third parties? It is contained in the long agreement we all click on program or service installation. We may therefore be closing the door after the horse has bolted. We can spend our time worrying about cookies when we have sold our privacy souls at the click of a button in a service agreement. Here is a section of the TOS (terms of service agreement) with Yahoo, it is by no means unusual. "Yahoo! collects information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners, including information about your use of financial products and services that we offer" It is also possible to find out information about us by other means. There are scripts that can be placed on a site that determine our operating system and programs we use, which is very useful to a software vendor. The plain and simple fact is that we cannot ensure our total privacy on the Internet. Safeguards We do though have options when it comes to cookies. Newer versions of all the major browsers have mechanisms to manage cookies. We can block cookies completely, block third party cookies or block those that do not have a privacy policy or a combination of these. A privacy policy is a code of practice the web sites can voluntarily agree to abide by the code. The Platform for Privacy Preferences 1.0 states "The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) enables web sites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily" The policy has guidelines for all uses of the Internet, from credit card transactions to mailing lists. It is a comprehensive document that enables companies hosting sites on the Internet to give assurances to its users about the practices it has. Internet Explorer 6.0 has the option to block cookies from sites that do not operate a privacy policy. The checking of this is now integrated into the browser and with increasing bandwidth access to the Internet should not pose a problem in browsing speed. I have no doubt though we have all visited sites that did not have this policy and were not adhering to this code. The cavalier concept of the Internet is very attractive to users. I know I have visited sites that were set up for free downloads of software located in Afghanistan and did not have a privacy policy. In fact they had no regard for International law. The Internet is a frontier and as such partially unregulated. It is part of its attraction. I have no doubt though that these sites will pass on information about us to others. We can of course as experienced computer users be vigilant. There is software out there that will block, or remove cookies from our computers. Will we though be so vigilant all the time? There are many ethical organisations that do adhere to a sensible privacy policy and they make it easy to find their policy and review it. Internet privacy is an issue that is in the spotlight, certainly in the United States. It is difficult to treat cookies separately from more general issues of privacy on the Internet. A recent bill introduced by the Bush administration was defeated on the grounds of privacy invasion. It would have allowed government agencies to link credit card transactions with car rentals, medical records and other electronic information. |
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