Many techie terms in the headlines lately. Supercookies, supertrackers, HTTP headers and X-UIDH. If you just skim the news you will learn that this is some kind of new threat against our privacy. But what is it really? Let’s dig a bit deeper. We will discover that this is an issue of surprisingly big importance.
Cookies are already familiar to most of us. These are small pieces of information that a web server can ask our browser to store. They are very useful for identifying users and managing sessions. They are designed with security and privacy in mind, and users can control how these cookies are used. In short, they are essential, they can be a privacy problem but we have tools to manage that threat.
What’s said above is good for us ordinary folks, but not so good for advertisers. Users get more and more privacy-aware and execute their ability to opt out from too excessive tracking. The mobile device revolution has also changed the game. More and more of our Internet access is done through apps instead of the browser. This is like using a separate “browser” for all the services we use, and this makes it a lot harder to get an overall picture of our surfing habits.
===> And that’s exactly what advertisers want, advertising is like a lottery with bad odds unless they know who’s watching the ad. <===
Learn more:
- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/digital-citizenship-social-media-and-privacy/
- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/privacy-in-the-digital-world-shouldnt-we-talk-about-it/
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For the last several months, cybersecurity experts have been warning Verizon Wireless that it was putting the privacy of its customers at risk. The computer codes the company uses to tag and follow its mobile subscribers around the web, they said, could make those consumers vulnerable to covert tracking and profiling.
Learn more:
- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?tag=supercookies
- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/privacy-in-the-digital-world-shouldnt-we-talk-about-it/