Tracking Cookies

Google finds itself in an impossible position. Privacy advocates have long demanded Google follow Microsoft and Mozilla's lead in purging tracking cookies from Chrome. Now that it's doing so, state attorneys general have filed an amended antitrust complaint that uses the so-called "Privacy Sandbox" as ammunition against the company.

Now more than ever, your online privacy is under attack. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools available to keep prying eyes off of your traffic.

Recently, I’ve heard some concern from ExtremeTech readers about the Ghostery privacy extension -- specifically regarding the Ghostrank data collection. To help clear things up, I contacted Ghostery directly.

Starting in 2015, everyone will be able to get their hands on a free, officially sanctioned SSL/TLS certificate so that HTTPS can finally be enabled everywhere. The new service -- a certificate authority (CA) called Let's Encrypt -- is led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai joining as major launch partners. If you don't know much about SSL, TLS, and HTTPS, trust me when I say that this is a very big deal.

Over the last week, it has emerged that Verizon Wireless has been silently tracking around 100 million mobile customers using a supercookie that can't be opted out of. The tracking cookie, as you can probably guess, allows Verizon to track almost everything that you do on the internet, and then sell that behavioral data to advertisers. Even worse, get this: Verizon's implementation of the supercookie is so sloppy that any third party can also use the cookie to track your behavior.

Just about everybody wants encryption to move forward to one extent or another, but as one former Google researcher points out, truly large scale encryption would be the end of the internet as we know it.

The wily geniuses at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have created the world's first real-time emotion detection app for Google Glass. The app (glassware, as Google prefers to call it) can also accurately detect someone's age or gender. Real-time emotion detection could be of great use for people with disorders such as autism, who often struggle to interpret facial expressions, or simply for people who struggle to divine their partner's true emotional state when they say that they're "fine.'

Google has admitted in an SEC filing that, in a few years, it 'could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.' If you thought that Google's recent forays into driverless cars, wearable computing, and smart homes were purely about creating awesome, life-enhancing products, you were mistaken: As always, Google has its ever-watchful eye on blanketing as much of the world as possible in advertising.

How does an ad-powered web browser sound to you? You might think of the idea as old-fashioned or dystopian, but Mozilla is on its way to delivering sponsored content slots to new Firefox users. This move has raised eyebrows across the community, and rightfully so. Mozilla is largely seen as a bastion of user advocacy, so this decision is slightly jarring to some. Even so, with a track record as solid as Mozilla's, the company deserves the benefit of the doubt until we actually see these ads in practice.

It has served us well for almost 20 years, but now the humble browser cookie is on its deathbed, faced with forced obsolescence by a new brand of super cookies. Developed by the likes of Microsoft and Google, super cookies will track you wherever you go, and whatever you do, whether it's on your smartphone, PC, game console, or even TV.