[LINK] Tracking

[Stephen Loosley]

Jim writes,
> It's fairly obvious to me that embedded intelligence will
> continue to increase over time.  We are clearly in the
> prototype era.  Hitting the sweet spot that aids rather than
> hinders, balances automation with user control, and doesn't
> subsume users needs to corporate objectives, in a system that
> supports different types of users with different levels of
> digitality is a Big Ask.


Yes agree with much you say regards tracking and harvesting Jim.


It's fairly obvious that the business model of many net-related
businesses in future will involve targetted, individualized ads
or services. Eg Google absolutely depends on it for selling ads.


That's selling advertising etc access to our demographic groups.


Yes, the business Big Ask is, "Hitting the sweet spot that aids
rather than hinders, balances automation with user control, and
doesn't subsume user needs to corporate objectives".


My real concern is that business will piss-on all user controls
to a achieve targetted access to us and our demographic to sell.


For example, here's another new and shonky scheme for tracking
mobile users, so far immune to tracking cookies. Now, how long
before Telstra or Optus want to jump on the same money spinner?

The American mobile provider "Verizon Wireless" has been subtly
altering the web traffic of its wireless customers for the past
two years," according to Wired, "inserting a string of about 50
letters, numbers and characters into data flowing between these
customers and the Web sites they visit. This is a "perma-cookie"


http://www.wired.com/2014/10/verizons-perma-cookie 


Verizon Wireless has been subtly altering the web traffic ofits wireless customers for the past two years, inserting a
string of about 50 letters, numbers, and characters into data
flowing between these customers and the websites they visit.




The company—one the country’s largest wireless carriers,
providing cell phone service for about 123 million subscribers
— calls this a Unique Identifier Header, or UIDH.




It’s a kind of short-term serial number that advertisers can
use to identify you on the web, and it’s the lynchpin of the
company’s internet advertising program. 





But critics say that it’s also a reckless misuse of Verizon’s
power as an internet service provider — something that could
be used as a trump card to obviate established privacy tools
such as private browsing sessions or “do not track” features. 





Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a technologist with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, wants Verizon to stop using the UIDH.




“ISPs are trusted connectors of users and they shouldn’t be
modifying our traffic on its way to the Internet,” he says. 





He calls the UIDH a “perma-cookie,” because it can be read
by any web server that you visit and used to build a profile
of your internet habits.




"I don't know how I missed this: Verizon is rewriting your HTTP

requests to insert a permacookie? Terrible.


http://t.co/MBDGZaLKNs


The UIDH headers weren’t discovered until someone configured
web traffic to log all headers and then noticed the extra data
coming from Verizon customers. 


That person, an EFF member, then reported it to the digital
rights organization. “It’s gone relatively unremarked by the 
security, privacy, and broader technical community, in part,
because it’s so hard to observe,” says Hoffman-Andrews.


But now Verizon is getting some extra scrutiny, as are the
other carriers. Late Friday, Hoffman-Andrews said he was
looking into anecdotal reports that AT&T was using a
similar type of identifier. 

--

Cheers,

Stephen