NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: nnsquad Digest, Vol 5, Issue 188
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 04:38:06PM -0400, ssc wrote: > But good tools exist, and as many using firefox know, you can quite > cleanly surf, even if you allow some cookies. Cookie Safe, better > Privacy, and Ghostery are all examples of fine work being done in this area. > As the spies heat up, anti-spies get better, and without much trouble, > you can be quite inconspicuous. I forsee this extending into the future > ad infinitum. > I do not believe this is correct. While Firefox extensions to detect trackers exist, the technical arms race between trackers and privacy enhancing technologies seems to be structurally skewed in favour of the trackers for a few reasons: 1. The trackers pay many more salaries to programmers 2. A third party tracker only needs to find one effective tracking mechanism; the defenders need to prevent all of them. 3. Only a tiny minority of users are knowledgeable about the most recent tracking methods and the technical steps and tools that might be required to mitigate them. A non-trivial percentage of people have finally heard the message from the 1990s about managing your cookies, but it turns out that's no longer enough. Three examples of how this plays out in practice: 1. To my knowledge, no desktop browsers know how to clear even the best-known supercookie types: http://samy.pl/evercookie/ 2. We know we have no really practical defenses against fingerprinting (see https://panopticlick.eff.org and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646704100959546.html) Unlike cookies, fingerprints do not need to be collected from a visible third party domain in order to be an effective Web-wide tracking mechanism. 3. Trackers can and do use all of these dirty tricks in the real world: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~d1jang/papers/ccs10.pdf These problems appear to need policy rather than technical solutions. That was the reason we came round to supporting the idea of a Do Not Track header. -- Peter Eckersley pde@eff.org Senior Staff Technologist Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131 Electronic Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993