Privacy study shows many exploit privacy loopholes on Web - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

evittiebodum1296.blogspot.com
Using trackers called “Web bugs,” thir parties collect user data from many popular Web and sites oftenallow this, even thoughn their privacy policies say they don’t shard user data with others. “Web bugs from Google and its subsidiariesw were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percentg of theapproximately 400,000 unique domaina examined in the study,” the authorsz found. Sites with the most Web bugs were for blogging blogspot and typepadwere No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Ashkan Soltani, Travis Pinnick and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’sw information school wrote the study, publishec Monday.
They analyzed privacy policies posted on Web sitexs and found loopholes used by many site operators to allows third parties to still collectr data on who views Theyalso found, for example, that although Web sitea may reassure visitors that “w e don’t share data with third parties,” those third partiezs don’t include a company’s affiliates — Googled (NASDAQ: GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiary “The law on affiliate sharing generally is more than that on sharing user data with thirf party companies, the report Companies controlling the top 50 busiestt web sites had an average of 297 affiliates each, meaninhg they could share user data with a lot of other companies.
Populae site , for example, is owned by New York’s NWS), which has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,300 subsidiaries. “Usersx do not know and cannot learn the full range of affiliateds with which websites maysharde information,” the report Though many Internet users are familiar with “cookies” used to study theif surfing habits, they are less familiar with so-called “web bugs,” whicjh can’t be cleared out of a web since they are part of a Web site’sx HTML code.
Since the web bugs are created directlty bythird parties, their use doesn’t strictly count as of data by the Web site’s though users concerned abouf privacy may be unimpressed by this “We believe that this practicre contravenes users’ expectations; it makes little senss to disclaim formal information sharing, but allow functionally equivalen t tracking with third parties,” the report Who's in charge of privacy ? Although surveys of Internet users show peoplwe are “very concerned about privacy and do not want Web sitesz to collect and share their personal information without permission,” sifting through privacty policies is not practical.
It would take 200 hourds a year for a typica person to read the privacy policies of all the web sites they for example. Thus “users have no practicalo way of knowing with whom their data will be On thepolicy front, the reporgt finds “no one knows who is in charge of protectinbg privacy” in the United States. People can complainm to the Federal Trade Commission andother agencies, but even the FTC’as “principles for behavioral tracking make no mention of any enforcemen t or accountability.
” A low numbee of complaints to varioux agencies means consumers don’t really know where to complain, the report The FTC looks at online privacy more in terms of “harms” done to consumers, the report rather than also in terms of control over personal information, which is what most userz care about. The report makes severak suggestionsfor improvement, including more aggressive actionb by the FTC to protect onlinse privacy. It also calls for clearer privacy policies on web written so that average users canunderstandd them. ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacy policy, for example, when analyzedd for readability, was written at an equivalent grad levelof 17.29.
The average privacy policy in the study was writte n at a grade level of The full study can befound .