The fact that there are only a few wikimedia personell who are able to access the information about browsing trails, and a few community representatives who can check the IP's for registered users doesn't mean Wikimedia doesn't spy. It spys heavily on editing, and then offers some of the information back to the community. That research was just focused on Flash cookies, not general ability to get information about users activities. If it doesn't store any IP address => HTTP GET URL information it would be making itself very open to DOS attacks that it wouldn't have any information to use to defend itself.
Maybe people should be educated in the ways they can defend against the systematic privacy issues like flash cookies and single pixel tracking cookies etc.,. I defend against long term profiling using the NoScript [1], BetterPrivacy [2] and Adblock Plus [3] addons for Firefox. Any flash or DOM storage that I actually allow, will still get wiped everytime the browser reboots, along with all of the cookies (only session cookies allowed in my browser settings). What a website learns within a single session of my browsing is their business as long as their Privacy Policy is accurate. If I didn't want it to be their business I would use a VPN or another anonimising program to further restrict the amount of information they can usefully put together about me. The amount of information they get shouldn't be reliant on me. Even the User-Agent can be spoofed to a generic string to deidentify the masses who are using the same method of anonymisation on the same website (ie, TorButton [4]). If you are personally worried, there are many many ways to protect yourself on the web. However, the majority of people won't ever realise their existence or see their importance unless a website started saying exactly what they knew about a person (especially a cross-domain entity like googlesyndication.com which incidentally papers.ssrn.com attempts to make me use if I didn't have adblock plus and noscript enabled to protect against) Cheers, Peter [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722 [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623 [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865 [4] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275 On 12 April 2010 08:19, Ziko van Dijk <zvand...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Hello, > > Gregory (? if I remember well) mentioned in August 2009 this: > http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862 > All examined sites spy on their visitors, but Wikimedia and Wikipedia. > > Kind regards > Ziko > > > 2010/4/11 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com>: >> On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Fuster, Mayo <mayo.fus...@eui.eu> wrote: >>> * Does the site learn from the navigation and searches? That is, if a >>> Wikipedia visitor who reads a Network entry then goes to the Manuel Castells >>> entry, Will the system understand there is a connexion between them? Will >>> next time put them together when presenting search results? >> >> No. >> >> Although that is an interesting area of research. >> >> Unfortunately, due to privacy concerns the data that would be required >> to invent such a system (search strings and search click through >> traces) is not available to the public. (and in fact, the traces >> aren't really collected, currently, as far as I know) >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wiki-research-l mailing list >> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l >> > > > > -- > Ziko van Dijk > NL-Silvolde > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
