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Thursday 11 February 2010
The Traceability of an Anonymous Online Comment

A recent privacy study from Berkeley shows how far such a strategy might reach. The Berkeley researchers found that nearly all of the top 100 sites on the web contain some sort of “web bug,” another term for the hidden web connection that allows a third party to automatically track a user on the site. Some of these sites will load dozens of web bugs on each page visit, which will litter user data far and wide on third party servers. Moreover, the study found that Google Analytics—by far the most popular website statistics service—was used by more than 70% of all sites they surveyed in March 2009. Once they add other Google-run services like Doubleclick and Adsense into the calculation, this figure rises to 88% of all sites that use some Google service—an astonishingly broad and dominant ability to follow users as they browse the web. But even other smaller, but still popular, third party entities have significant reach across thousands of sites across the web.

The traceability of any given site visitor will still depend on context: the number of third party services used by the site, the popularity of each third party service across the web, the types of identifying data that these parties collect and store, whether the speaker used any online anonymity tools, and many other site-specific factors.

Despite the variability in third party tracing capabilities, the nearly simultaneous connections to a few third party services means that the results of tracing can be combined. By sleuthing through information held in third party dossiers, logs and databases, plaintiffs in John Doe lawsuits will have many more discovery options than they had ever previously imagined.

10 notes

  1. interfaceinyerface reblogged this from azspot and added:
    Read the whole post at Freedom to Tinker. Or, check out KnowPrivacy.org, and watch their short video on web bugs. And...
  2. flyonair reblogged this from azspot
  3. azspot posted this

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