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.

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.

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

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Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

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Those information would then be compiled, encrypted and the OpenDHT distributed storage service is used to store location update of the notebook. Those location updates can then be retrieved from another computer revealing information about IP addresses (internal and external), the time, access points and nearby routers.

This information can be filtered to display only data of a specific date range. This should be tested at least once to make sure everything has been setup correctly.

The Adeona software is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. The Mac version has an interesting additional feature. It can create screenshots with a camera and add those to the tracking information.

The main application according to the developers is to recover a stolen notebook. The main problem with this kind of software based tracking is that it might help against a normal thief who keeps the notebook as his own and does not completely wipe the hard disks before using it. A clever thief would problem do that and install another operating system to start over.

I guess some users will find different uses for this kind of software, like tracking their children, wifes, girlfriends, husbands to see what they are doing.

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In my opinion though the loss of privacy does not justify the gain, because in the end it does not really matter that much if you know if someone read the email or visited the link you send him. Tracking users, no matter if its done in large scale by companies or in smaller scale by individuals, is not right. Not for this purpose anyone.

Enough of the ramblings. I’m the last to tell you what you can and cannot do on the Internet. I just wanted to make my position clear before posting the links to the following two websites.

Linkblip and UrlVi are two online scripts that convert links into urls that are tracked much like tinyurl but with tracking included. If someone clicks the links you will be notified by email if you have been using Linkblip or by accessing a page of statistics if you have been using UrlVi.

Both bring fourth another concern that i have. They disguise the original link which is a technique used by spammers as well. Instead of showing the link url www.ghacks.net they display http://lburl.com/dcgdy or http://urlvi.be/rus2k which do not reveal any information about the destination.

I would be very cautious about such a link even if a friend would be sending it to me. My first reaction would be to call, chat or reply to that friend asking what the link was all about.

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