gHacks technology news » internet privacy http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Internet Privacy Study http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/07/internet-privacy-study/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/07/internet-privacy-study/#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:23:00 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/07/internet-privacy-study/ internet privacyThree researchers of the UC Berkeley School of Information have published results of an Internet privacy study that analyzed web privacy, data collection and information sharing on today’s Internet. Interested users can download the fill Internet privacy report from the project’s website or view the majority of its findings directly on the website.

Each of the four main areas consumer complaints, web bugs, privacy policies and affiliate analysis is divided into key findings, recommendations and methodology. They are complemented by an introduction and an analysis of the top 50 websites on the Internet.

Some interesting findings of the Internet privacy study reveal that Google is able to track users on 92 of the 100 most visited websites on the Internet and still 88% of a total of 393,829 analyzed distinct domains. The high percentage is a combination of services owned by Google including Google Analytics, Google Adsense and DoubleClick.

google tracking

Microsoft was the company on the second place with an appearance on 60% on the top 100 websites followed by Omniture and Quantcast with 57%. A similar observation was made in the Privacy Policies analysis. All sites making up the top 50 sites of the Internet collect user data and at least 46 share that data with affiliates without disclosing who those affiliates are. The majority on the other hand claims to offer no access to the data to third parties which can be confusing for the user as affiliates are usually seen as third party from the user’s point of view.

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The Internet privacy study draws a grim picture of the state of today’s online privacy.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/07/internet-privacy-study/feed/ 4 Internet Privacy: Start Panic Tells You Where You Have Been http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/25/internet-privacy-start-panic-tells-you-where-you-have-been/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/25/internet-privacy-start-panic-tells-you-where-you-have-been/#comments Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:33:14 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/25/internet-privacy-start-panic-tells-you-where-you-have-been/ start panicInternet privacy (also know as online privacy or web privacy) has become a hot topic in the last years as companies, organizations and people with malicious intent try to gather as many data as possible about Internet users. Many users install security software on their computer system and as add-ons in their web browsers directly to protect their systems against various attacks including those privacy breaches.

Start Panic tries to raise public awareness for Internet privacy issues on their website. They have implemented a script that will gather information about previously used websites from the user’s web browser. Two aspects make this interesting. The first is that it is a cross-browser solution. It works in all major web browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari. The second aspect is that it will display results even if the user clears his web browser’s history, cookies and cache regularly. The current browsing session is recorded normally in all web browsers which usually have options to automatically clear these traces on exit only.

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The process is started by the user who has to press the Let’s Start button. It can take a minute or two before the results are displayed. The list should contain the list of websites that have been visited in this browsing session. It might contain more websites if the user is not deleting the history regularly.

Little is revealed about how the script does its magic but it seems to rely on JavaScript. Anyone with JavaScript disabled in the web browser does not have to fear this privacy issue.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/25/internet-privacy-start-panic-tells-you-where-you-have-been/feed/ 12 Private Browsing Not So Private After All http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/01/private-browsing-not-so-private-after-all/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/01/private-browsing-not-so-private-after-all/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:27:04 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=9489 The last year or so has been filled with announcements about private browsing. Each web browser developer implemented or announced plans to add private browsing to their web browser. Private browsing usually means to offer a sandboxed browsing session in computer memory with no information written and stored on the computer’s hard drive. Privacy is one of the biggest buzz words around and will continue to grow in popularity in 2009. The public understanding of private browsing might differ from what private browsing actually does. It definitely does not add privacy to anything that is happening remotely on the Internet. The only gain of private browsing is an increase of privacy in the local environment.

This may however be not the only problem associated with private browsing. A recent paper by security researcher Kate McKinley confirms deficiencies in all web browsers and especially in Apple’s Safari. Not only normal cookie and data handling was tested but also plugin related handling of Flash and Google Gears data. The surprising result was that no browser passed all private browsing tests.


In fact, all of the existing private browsing modes have some form of data which is not cleared when users enter or leave private browsing modes. Although Chrome cleared the only tested type of data it stored, it was surprising to find that Gears data was not cleared, since Gears is included in the browser. However, this behavior is consistent across all browsers tested, as we will see later.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 clears cookies and session storage properly, but the persistent storage (window.globalStorage) is preserved between a normal and private browsing session.With IE 8 (Beta 2), both cookies and session storage were cleared properly, however the IE user Data stores were not cleared between the normal and private browsing sessions.

Safari on Windows fared the worst of all in these tests with respect to private browsing, and did not clear any data at all, either before entering or after exiting the private mode. On OSX, Safari’s behavior was quirky; in no case was the HTML 5 database storage cleared before or after private browsing. Previously set cookies seem to continue to be available if the user entered a private browsing session, but if the user started the browser and went directly into private browsing, it seemed to behave as expected.

All browsers have troubles with Flash Cookies and their private browsing modes. This is largely due to the way Flash Cookies are created and stored (without user interaction and means to display warnings). So what’s the conclusion in this matter? Users who like to use the private browsing mode should not use Apple’s Safari in its current stage. They should also make sure to either disable Flash and other third party plugins or use settings that prevent them from acting automatically (for example by using NoScript in Firefox).

Check out the Flash Cookies Explained article if you want to read up on Flash Cookies and find out where they are stored and how they can be deleted from a computer system.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/01/private-browsing-not-so-private-after-all/feed/ 13 Protecting your Search Privacy http://www.ghacks.net/2006/01/24/protecting-your-search-privacy/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/01/24/protecting-your-search-privacy/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2006 15:52:03 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=292 Searchenginewatch published a rather large article about protecting your search privacy today. They provide a step-by-step guide how your search privacy gets exposed from your desktop to the sites you visit. They divided the article into six chapters beginning with Search Privacy On Your Own Computer and ending with a conclusion that gives you valuable tips on how to protect your search privacy.]]> Searchenginewatch published a rather large article about protecting your search privacy today. They provide a step-by-step guide how your search privacy gets exposed from your desktop to the sites you visit. They divided the article into six chapters beginning with Search Privacy On Your Own Computer and ending with a conclusion that gives you valuable tips on how to protect your search privacy.

With recent announcements that want to force the search engines to reveal what is searched by whom this article should be a must read.

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