2013年7月4日星期四

Tools To Help You Hide Online Raise The Ire Of Advertisers

But cookie-blocking is a blunt instrument, and when you turn it on, some sites don't work right. Mozilla's lead privacy engineer, Sid Stamm, says he wants to build a better cookie-blocker, "one that blocks only the bad stuff and allows only the good stuff."That master list will be the Cookie Clearinghouse, which will be hosted at Stanford. Experts will curate the list, with an eye to transparency and user privacy, while looking for certain technical problems that only human beings can sort out.

It's those humans Rothenberg doesn't trust. "They're academic elites who have no relationship whatsoever with the business of advertising, making Star Chamber decisions about what gets blocked and what doesn't get blocked," he says.Advertisers worry about the financial consequences. If Mozilla's super-cookie-blocker catches on, it could undermine the business of targeted advertising — particularly the third-party ads that sustain "the mommy blogs and the libertarian political sites," as Rothenberg puts it.For the past few years, the online advertisers have been negotiating with browser makers and privacy groups over the details of the "Do Not Track" system. The DNT option is already built in to most of the newest browsers. You can check if yours is on by visiting this test page.

The problem is DNT doesn't do much, yet. The parties haven't been able to agree on what websites should do when they see that you've set the Do Not Track option on your browser (or your mobile device). The negotiations, hosted by the W3C organization, have been bogged down by a lot of details. But the core difference is that advertisers believe DNT should limit which ads you see, while privacy groups think DNT should block websites from collecting your information.The current uproar over spying by the National Security Agency has increased public concern about privacy, which in turn has turned up the pressure on all sides to finally agree to a DNT standard. Browser manufacturers are especially worried about blowback from the public; just a week after the first NSA leaks, Microsoft ran big Sunday newspaper ads that tried to reassure the public about privacy — and it touted Internet Explorer's Do Not Track function as evidence of the company's concern for user privacy.

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