from:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20000712/tc/nearly_undetectable_tracking_dev
ice_raises_concern_3.html
Wednesday July 12 08:00 PM EDT
Nearly undetectable tracking device raises
concern
By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com
A widely used, yet virtually undetectable, means of tracking people's
Internet
surfing habits is joining its better-known cousin, the cookie, as the
subject of
several lawsuits and a privacy initiative by the government.
The technology, often called Web bugs or
1-pixel gifs, is prompting further concern that
the
once-freewheeling Web is becoming more like
an Orwellian Big Browser.
Like cookies, Web bugs are electronic tags that
help Web sites and advertisers track visitors'
whereabouts in cyberspace. But Web bugs are
invisible on the page and are much smaller, about the size of the
period at the
end of this sentence.
A Web bug "is like a beacon, so that every time you hit a Web page it
sends
a ping or call-back to the server saying 'Hi, this is who I am and this
is where
I am,'" said Craig Nathan, chief technology officer for privacy
start-up
Meconomy.com and former technical liaison for Personify.
Most computers have cookies, which are placed on a person's hard drive
when a banner ad is displayed or a person signs up for an online
service.
Savvy Web surfers know they are being tracked when they see a banner
ad.
But people can't see Web bugs, and anti-cookie filters won't catch
them. So
the Web bugs wind up tracking surfers in areas online where banner ads
are
not present or on sites where people may not expect to be trailed.
That was the case last month when the White House ordered its drug
policy
office to stop using Web bugs on the government's anti-drug site
Freevibe.com. Following the mandate, the Clinton administration issued
strict
new rules regulating federal use of the technology, which can
surreptitiously
collect personal information.
Web bugs can "talk" to existing cookies on a computer if they are both
from
the same Web site or advertising company, such as DoubleClick, which
uses
bugs and dominates the online advertising market.
That means, for example, that if a person visited Johnson & Johnson's
YourBaby Web site, which uses DoubleClick Web bugs, the bug would read
the visitor's DoubleClick cookie ID number, which shows the past online
behavior for that computer. The information would then go back to
DoubleClick.
Ad networks and agencies say cookies and other tracking devices are
used
to help both consumers and Web sites. Under fire from privacy
advocates,
ad executives have consistently said the information collected is kept
private
and is the sole property of the company that is being advertised.
The "evil" of Web bugs
But privacy advocates see an insidious side to the tiny tag.
"The danger of that is that if you were going to a site on yeast
infections, the
second it loads up, before the screen loads, somewhere in the world the
fact
that you visited the site is now registered. That's the evil of Web
bugs," said
Ira Rothken, a lawyer at the technology-oriented Rothken Law Firm,
based
in San Rafael, Calif.
The problem is magnified, he said, when a company can tie your cookie
number to personal identifying information such as a phone number and
address.
This became a real concern last November when DoubleClick bought
Abacus Direct, a company that holds detailed consumer profiles on more
than 90 percent of U.S. households. Syncing DoubleClick's database
about
Net surfers with personally identifiable data set off a firestorm of
criticism, as
well as a government inquiry. DoubleClick has since dropped plans to
link
the databases until there is agreement between government and the
industry
on appropriate standards.
"Web bugs were developed to not let you know (you're being tracked) and
for the simple design aspect of an invisible dot," Nathan said.
Rothken filed a consumer Internet privacy suit against DoubleClick in
February, and there are three other similar suits against the ad
network.
Also in February, the state attorney general in Michigan began legal
proceedings against DoubleClick. The attorney general claimed the
company
had violated consumer protection laws by not telling Web visitors that
DoubleClick regularly put cookies and Web bugs on their hard drives.
The other side of the coin is that Web bugs, like cookies, can be
useful. For
consumers, cookies can store passwords and other sign-on information.
For
Web sites, Web bugs can help better manage content by knowing what is
effective. They also give online ad agencies a way to track campaigns
when a
banner isn't present.
Bang for their advertising buck
"Using traffic-log cookies or clear gifs is a way for advertisers to
learn
whether they're getting the most bang for their advertising dollar,"
said Jules
Polonetsky, chief privacy officer at DoubleClick. "It's a tool that
does not
provide any personal information but allows the Web site to learn how
users
are visiting different areas of their site and learn which ads brought
them to their site.
"We are contractually obligated to maintain that information solely for
the use of the site; it's critically private
information," Polonetsky said.
Web bugs have sparked much criticism from Net experts of late.
Richard Smith, a computer security expert, said that a wide variety of
medical and pornography sites are using
the tags. He said there are Web bugs on such sites as Procrit, which
has information about AIDS drugs, and
iFriends.net, an online version of an adult peep show.
Smith has set up a Web site that searches for Web bugs. A quick search
on that site for such bugs issued by
DoubleClick, for example, returned more than 80,000 hits.
Web bugs can also be used in email. For example, companies can send a
bulk HTML email newsletter that has
Web bugs, which will determine how many people read the letter, how
often they read it, and whether they
forward it to anyone. The email "would include your email address in
the URL or include a coded ID or
encrypted email address to track when you opened it," Smith said.
"Web bugs are like carbon monoxide for Internet privacy," said Jason
Catlett, a privacy advocate with
Junkbusters. "You can't see them, but they can damage your privacy
anyway."
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