Thomas JonesAn open dialogue on Internet and Society

A wide swath of the nets top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobes Flash player to recreate cookies deleted by users.

At issue is technology from Quantcast, also targeted in the lawsuit. Quantcast created Flash cookies that track users across the web, and used them to recreate traditional browser cookies that users deleted from their computers. These “zombie” cookies came to light last year, after researchers at UC Berkeley documented deleted browser cookies returning to life. Quantcast quickly fixed the issue, calling it an unintended consequence of trying to measure web traffic accurately.

via Privacy lawsuit targets Net giants over “zombie” cookies.

The privacy issues that have been hounding Facebook may be coming to a head. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicates that the Facebook, along with MySpace, Digg, and a handful of other social-networking sites, have been sharing users personal data with advertisers without users knowledge or consent.

The data shared includes names, user IDs, and other information sufficient to enable ad companies such as the Google-owned DoubleClick to identify distinct user profiles. Some of the sites in question, including MySpace and Facebook, stopped sharing the data after the Journal asked them about it. The surreptitious data sharing was first noticed PDF by researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs in August 2009, who brought it up with the sites in question. It wasnt until WSJ contacted them that changes were made.

via Report: Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisers.

Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read.

“The government says the Fourth Amendment does not protect these e-mails,” Kevin Bankston, an EFF lawyer, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “What we’re talking about is archives of our personal correspondence that they would need a warrant to get from your computer but not from the server.”

via Yahoo, Feds Battle Over E-Mail Privacy | Threat Level | Wired.com.

What kids post online today could come back to haunt them. C.J. Pascoe, PhD., a sociology professor at Colorado College, explains why they do it anyway.

One-Way Mirror Society | Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

by Ryan Calo

Pam Dixon of World Privacy Forum has released an eye-opening new report(PDF) about offline consumer surveillance. Pam describes a quiet revolution in digital signage able to profile us as “users” of real space. I’ve writtenbefore about the danger of techniques developed on the Internet bleeding out into the real world. Well here is the proof. As Wired’s Chris Anderson recently wrote in another context, “atoms are the new bits.” Pam’s report shows just why that matters.

Even as the issue of privacy continues to confound much brighter people than me, the related problem of securing the Internet has also been getting a great deal of attention. This is in part due to the widely-reported announcement from Google that its servers and the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents had been hacked, leading the company to threaten to leave China altogether if its government continues to censor search results.

These attacks and the lack of adequate defenses are leading companies and law enforcement agencies to work more closely, if only after the fact. But privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are concerned about increasingly cozy relations between major Internet service providers and law enforcement agencies including the NSA.
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