Watching the internet


Government is sloppy or sneaky. You decide
CNET's news.com has been running a series on the government violating it's own privacy policies.

Part 1 deals with web bugs and persistent cookies set by some agency sites, and part 2 deals with persistent cookies set by some Congressional sites.

Supposedly it's because of the default settings of some web creation software. CNET does stress the irony of government agencies with no understanding of their own software and of Congressmen trying to "protect" privacy.

At this point, I don't see it as a problem until there is widescale integration. For example, a cookie set by the IRS interacting with your bank website.

I am fascinated by the idea of web bugs though. A web bug is a picture loaded by your browser or email software. The picture doesn't have to be very big, it could be just one pixel (or even a transparent pixel). But once that picture is displayed, a server tracks who has loaded the picture.

In moderation, I can see this as a useful tool. For example, at the moment the NeoWayland NetWork badge at the bottom of the navigation bar to the right isn't on my Itsamac space. But if I were to put it there, I could track not only this site but the other three sites that are a part of the network. I may end up doing that.

So far no problem. But the same idea could be used in emails. So once you viewed the email, a server would have a record of you and your email addy, even if you didn't see a picture. Remember the picture could be very small or even invisible. This is annoying, but hardly critical.

But I did think of one possible huge government abuse. Say that the companies who provide web creation software were compelled to include code that creates web bugs in every page. If a server and domain were set up correctly, the actual image could be virtual. So the web page would try to load a web bug using an addy based on the serial number of the software (registered creators) and the page location in the site directory, but that would be passed off as a virtual call to the web bug server. It would pass any call for a picture to something like spy.gov/bug.gif, even though the address created by the web software would be something quite different. The web bug server would then have a record of your computer, which site you tried to access, and the owner of the software that created the site.

Something to watch out for.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - January 6, 2006 at 05:12 PM  Tag


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