Online Privacy Warnings

[oz]

If you are concerned about online privacy issues, the ideas presented at the link below sound like a good plan to me:

BBC News - Web privacy tools to warn of internet tracking cookies

Internet users will receive a warning if sites do not respect their privacy thanks to new tools being developed by the web's standards setting body.

Like so many other things, this might not all work out as intended in the end, but I do like the idea of getting a warning that my privacy concerns are not being taken into consideration.

[daark.child]

I like the ideas as well. I just hope they are not the type of ideas that some websites will just ignore.

[cousinlucky]

Thanks Ozar!! I have to wonder though about " More than 15 firms and organisations are involved in the Do Not Track work including Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, " !! Are these firms involved to circumvent the intended purpose??

[elija]

Do Not Track is already in Firefox. Certainly version 8. Google, of course, are trying legal challenges against it in California because their profits are more important than your privacy.

My source for the Google story is an article in Linux Format Magazine.

[oz]

Do Not Track is already in Firefox. Certainly version 8.

Right... and I've been enabling "Do Not Track" in Firefox for a while now, but always get this feeling that it's not doing much good.

[SL6-A1000]

Yeah it does sound good, although if they don't enforce it somehow than people will ignore it. Hopefully it becomes a standard web creators have to abide by, that has a penalty like other laws relating to internet usage.

The firefox addon "do not track" to me just seems like an addvertisment to say i have something to hide, please do track me! as it notifies the web hoster...

I prefer to just wipe my cookies every week! by scheduling firefox to do so.

[elija]

At the moment it's voluntary but

it’s got the support of the European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission in the United States of America. These regulatory bodies are pushing advertisers to support the standard, and have threatened to introduce legislation if they don’t act voluntarily.

In relation to Google, the article actually says

In fact, Google, the creator of Chrome, has recently signed a letter opposing Do Not Track legislation in California since it feels it will unnecessarily impact on its advertising business.

so it's not legal action but from the sounds of it political lobbying.

[cynwulf]

The firefox addon "do not track" to me just seems like an addvertisment to say i have something to hide, please do track me! as it notifies the web hoster...

Yes and it's essentially worthless as it only works with participating sites.

It's worth bearing in mind that one of the biggest tracking and spyware companies out there is google and mozilla are google funded and have google's geolocation enabled in firefox by default.

At the end of the day there is no "safe browser" - the www isn't safe.

[sgosnell]

BetterPrivacy and Ghostery may be useful add-ons to Firefox for disabling trackers and LSOs. I have Ghostery installed and it reports blocking most trackers. It will show you all the trackers on a page, and let you decide which to block.

[oz]

BetterPrivacy and Ghostery may be useful add-ons to Firefox for disabling trackers and LSOs.

I do install BetterPrivacy and find it useful. Haven't ever looked at Ghostery but will check it out... thanks!