Stanford Engineering Digital Magazine Article

The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild is the first large-scale study of three advanced web tracking mechanisms - canvas fingerprinting, evercookies and use of "cookie syncing" in conjunction with evercookies.

Web Transparency & Accountability Project @ Princeton

24% of the population currently cares deeply enough about their online privacy to take significant actions to try to protect it.

Personal details from your Internet profile—from your professional history to how many friends you have—are being collected, analyzed, and sold.

This report focuses on government use of commercial data brokers, the implications for that usage, and what needs to be done to address privacy problems. The government must bring itself fully to heel in the area of privacy. If it is going to outsource its data needs to commercial data brokers, it needs to attach the privacy standards it would have been held to if it had collected the data itself. Outsourcing is not an excuse for evading privacy obligations.

This report discusses the issue of cloud computing and outlines its implications for the privacy of personal information as well as its implications for the confidentiality of business and governmental information. The report finds that for some information and for some business users, sharing may be illegal, may be limited in some ways, or may affect the status or protections of the information shared. The report discusses how even when no laws or obligations block the ability of a user to disclose information to a cloud provider, disclosure may still not be free of consequences. The report finds that information stored by a business or an individual with a third party may have fewer or weaker privacy or other protections than information in the possession of the creator of the information. The report, in its analysis and discussion of relevant laws, finds that both government agencies and private litigants may be able to obtain information from a third party more easily than from the creator of the information. A cloud provider’s terms of service, privacy policy, and location may significantly affect a user’s privacy and confidentiality interests.

New forms of sophisticated digital signage networks are being deployed widely by retailers and others in both public and private spaces. From simple people-counting sensors mounted on doorways to sophisticated facial recognition cameras mounted in flat video screens and end-cap displays, digital signage technologies are gathering increasing amounts of detailed information about consumers, their behaviors, and their characteristics.

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.

Mobile messaging app Snapchat, which promised its users ephemeral, disappearing picture and video messages, has settled FTC charges that pics and videos sent through its app weren’t as ephemeral as the company promised. According to the FTC, Snapchat transmitted users’ location data, and collected users’ address books without notice or consent. Also, the snaps weren’t protected from disappearing as fully as the company had promised. The FTC complaint also discussed a Snapchat security breach that allowed an attacker to compile a database of 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers.

If you are a Facebook user, unless you have actively opted out of the Nielsen tracking, Nielsen can track your clicks and views for its online measurement research. Nielsen/Facebook have already been tracking online advertising that people see, beginning in 2009/2010. Going forward, the Facebook/Nielsen tracking will also measure your TV viewing on mobiles and tablets. The Nielsen/Facebook tracking occurs while you are logged in to Facebook.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

An information broker collects information about individuals from public records and private sources including census and change of address records, motor vehicle and driving records, user-contributed material to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, media and court reports, voter registration lists, consumer purchase histories, most-wanted lists and terrorist watch lists, bank card transaction records, health care authorities, and web browsing histories.

The data are aggregated to create individual profiles, often made up of thousands of individual pieces of information such as a person's age, race, gender, height, weight, marital status, religious affiliation, political affiliation, occupation, household income, net worth, home ownership status, investment habits, product preferences and health-related interests. Brokers then sell the profiles to other organizations that use them mainly to target advertising and marketing towards specific groups, to verify a person's identity including for purposes of fraud detection, and to sell to individuals and organizations so they can research people for various reasons. Data brokers also often sell the profiles to government agencies, such as the FBI, thus allowing law enforcement agencies to circumvent laws that protect privacy.

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that are typically mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers, or attached to police squad cars. ALPRs automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view,...