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Using trackers called “web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many populafWeb sites, and sites often allow even though their privac y policies say they don’t share user data with “Web bugs from Google and its subsidiariese were found on 92 of the top 100 Web siteas and 88 percent of the approximately 400,00p0 unique domains examined in the study,” the authors found. Sites with the most web bugs were forbloggingt — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Googls itself was No. 3. Ashkan Travis Pinnick and Joshuza Gomez ofthe university’s information schooo wrote the study, published Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on Web sites and found loopholes used by many site operatorss to allow third parties to collecy data on whoviewsd pages. They also found, for example, that thougj Web sites might reassure visitorsthat “we don’t share data with third parties,” thosre third parties don’t include a company’s affiliate — Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), for has 137 subsidiary businesses. “The law on affiliate sharinb generally ismore permissive” than that on sharing user data with thirfd party companies, the report said.
Companie s controlling the top 50 busies Web sites had an average of 297 affiliates meaning they could share user data with a lot ofother companies. Popular site , for is owned by New York’s (Nasdaq: NWS), whichn has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. (NYSE: BAC) in N.C. has more than 2,300 “Users do not know and cannot learn the full ranges of affiliates with which websites mayshard information,” the report said.
Thouggh many Internet users are familiarwith “cookies” used to study their surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-calledd “web bugs,” which can’t be clearecd out of a web browser because they are part of a Web site’ s HTML code. Because the web bugs are created directlyy bythird parties, their use doesn’y strictly count as “sharing” of data by the Web site’sw owner, though users concerned about privacy mighyt be unimpressed by this technicality.
“We believe that this practicr contravenes users’ expectations; it makes littlre sense to disclaim formalinformation sharing, but alloa functionally equivalent tracking with third parties,” the report Who's in charge of privacy? Although surveys of Internet userd show people are “very concerned about privacy and do not want websitesz to collect and share their personao information without permission,” sifting through privacy policiesa is not practical. It would take 200 hoursa a year for a typical person to read the privacty policies of all the Web sitedsthey visit, for example.
Thus “userx have no practical way of knowing with whom their data will be On thepolicy front, the report finds “no one knowas who is in charge of protecting in the United People can complain to the Federao Trade Commission and other but even the FTC’s “principles for behaviorao tracking make no mention of any enforcement or A low number of complaintzs to various agencies means consumers don’t really know where to the report said. The FTC looks at onlinwe privacy more in termsof “harms” done to consumers, the reporft said, rather than also in terms of control over personal information, which is what most userss care about.
The report makes several suggestionsefor improvement, including more aggressive action by the FTC to protecg online privacy. It also calls for clearef privacy policies onWeb sites, writtenj so that average users can understandx them. ’s (Nasdaq: ADBE) privacy for example, when analyzed for readability, was writtenm at an equivalent grade levelof 17.29. The average privacy policty in the study was written at a gradr levelof 13.83. The full study can be founed .
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