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Following a Wall Street Journal report last week which revealed that search giant Google had developed a way to bypass privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, the head honchos at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) division started wondering if their competitor was doing the same to them.
As it would turn out, they absolutely are, according to a lengthy explanation published Monday by IE corporate vice president Dean Hachamovitch.
“We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE,” he wrote. “The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.”
Microsoft claims Google undermined Internet Explorer privacy settings
Seeded on Tue Feb 21, 2012 12:18 PM EST
Article Source: Raw Story
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- Public Discussion (5)
Is it just me, but are a lot of the "cool" technology companies starting to show an evil side? Google, Facebook and Apple have all been in the news recently.
- 3 votes
#1 - Tue Feb 21, 2012 12:23 PM ESTGoogle, Facebook and Apple have all been in the news recently.
Apple was in the news, but it was Path that was doing the evil. And, as other have reported, Twitter was doing the exact same thing that Path did.
- 1 vote
Well, I'm shocked, just shocked that Google would be seeking to circumvent controls that would compromise it's ability to monetize it's search/ad revenue stream.
Or perhaps that is an excess of sarcasm.
- 2 votes
#2 - Tue Feb 21, 2012 12:28 PM ESTOne other comment of note: I am mildly disgusted that "evil" has become so devalued in today's parlance. I would blame Google, but their's was only the most recent high profile misuse. The vast plains of bad contain the wide spectrum of badness long before we tread the bleak frontier of truly evil: atrocious, base, depraved, execrable, foul, heinous, iniquitous, loathesome, malevolent, malicious, offensive, pernicious, repugnant, and vile.
All more appropos than leaping right to evil. The correct question to ask is - are these examples seeking to do damage to individuals? Are they ignoring fundamental human rights in order to place their own desires above those of the individual? And are they doing that at a level that is truly evil? Or is immediately leaping to a declaration of "evil", simply shorthand for "I don't like what they are doing".
- 2 votes
You make a good point. Perhaps evil is not the right word. Maybe criminal would suffice.
Google is picking the locks in our browsers the way a burglar would pick the lock of our back door, and has even built a separate set of picking tools for different locks. Google and Facebook both rely on user naivety, people think they are getting "something for nothing" while these companies collect every bit of data they can about us, so they can use and sell it in any way they want. Apple's closed iPhone and iPad software allow any "approved" app to access any information on the device, then do whatever it is programmed to do with it.
If the US government would be caught doing any of these things there would be hell to pay.
are these examples seeking to do damage to individuals?
Good question. If you sell health insurance companies a list of people who did research on cancer (for whatever reason) how might that information be used? Or maybe you are interested in tricks to pay less taxes, would the IRS be interested in that list?
As a concept, in the movie The Matrix humans were being used as batteries. They were kept in pods, fed nutrients and given an illusion of living somewhere else. Where those individuals "damaged?" I think we can agree that they were being used.
And that is what these companies are doing. They are taking our personal information by hook or crook, as much as they can get, and capitalize on it. They use us. They use the illusion of a "free" search engine or "free" virtual community to enable their ultimate goal: collecting and selling information about us without our realizing this is happening.
Maybe evil is not the right word, but it is certainly in the right direction.
IMHO, of course!
- 1 vote
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