Microsoft Will Remove “Do Not Track” As The Default Setting In Its New Browsers

Weekends Are The Best Time To Promote Most Apps, Study FindsMicrosoft today announced that going forward, it will not turn on the “Do Not Track” feature in the upcoming versions of Internet Explorer and Spartan by default.
The “Do Not Track” setting in many popular browsers tells websites and their advertisers that you want to opt out of third-party tracking for advertising purposes. All of the major browser vendors, including Google, Mozilla, Opera, Apple and Microsoft, support this feature, but whether advertisers honor the user’s request — and it’s no more than a request sent by the browser — is up to them. And most probably don’t.
Microsoft started enabling “Do Not Track” as the default setting with the launch of Internet Explorer 10. Unsurprisingly, this created a bit of a controversy. Previous to Microsoft’s decision, advertisers had agreed to honor Do Not Track, as long as it wasn’t the default setting. They argued that the decision not to be tracked should be made by the user and not the browser vendor. Microsoft stuck to its guns saying users could always opt out during the setup process, and “Do Not Track” remained the default — until now (and the number of advertisers that honored it remained low).
Chrome and Firefox leave “Do Not Track” off by default.
Today, the company is reversing its stand. Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch argues that it’s doing so in order to comply with the latest draft of the official W3C standard for “Do Not Track.” This new draft explicitly notes that “the signal sent MUST reflect the user’s preference, not the choice of some vendor, institution, site or network-imposed mechanism outside the user’s control; this applies equally to both the general preference and exceptions.”
“Put simply, we are updating our approach to DNT to eliminate any misunderstanding about whether our chosen implementation will comply with the W3C standard,” Lynch writes today. “Without this change, websites that receive a DNT signal from the new browsers could argue that it doesn’t reflect the users’ preference, and therefore, choose not to honor it.”
Given the voluntary nature of “Do Not Track,” it probably doesn’t matter all that much whether you turn it on or off anyway. If you want to make sure you aren’t tracked, using tools like Disconnect  and add-ons like Ghostery, uBlock and the EFF’s Privacy Badger is more effective anyway — at least on the desktop

By: Unknown On 11:42

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Google Says 5% Of Web Browsers Have Ad Injectors Installed

Facebook’s New Photo “Scrapbook” Lets Parents Give Kids An Official PresenceAccording to a study Google conducted with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, 5 percent of people visiting Google’s sites and services now have at least one ad injector installed.
When it comes to malware, ad injectors may seem relatively benevolent at first. They put an ad on your Google Search page that didn’t belong there, for example. That’s annoying, but doesn’t seem dangerous. But ad injection was pretty much what Lenovo’s Superfish was doing and that created plenty of security issues for users. Indeed, the research, which is based on the analysis of 100 million pageviews across Google’s sites from Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, classified about a third of these injectors as “outright malware.”
Given that these kinds of ad injectors are often bundles with legitimate software — and desktop developers and download sites often see them as a relatively easy way to make a bit of extra money with their installers and download wrappers — it’s easy enough to install one of them inadvertently.
Google and the Berkeley researchers found that ad injectors are now available on all major platforms and browsers. Out of those 5 percent of users that have at least one installed, one-third actually had four of them running simultaneously and half were running two. Clearly, there is a group of users that is a bit more prone to catching one of these than others.
Google says it is publishing these numbers (and a more detailed research report on May 1) to raise awareness about ad injectors.
“Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem,” Google Safe Browsing engineer Nav Jagpal writes in today’s announcement. “They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers and publishers alike. ”
Given that these programs inject themselves between the browser and the website, and change the website’s code, browsers have a hard time figuring out which ads are legitimate and which ones are not.
“In broader terms, the question of just who ultimately controls the information presented to users is of great and increasing importance – it’s one of the most vital issues the digital world faces,” UC Berkeley EECS professor Vern Paxson noted in a statement today. “Ad injection undermines the integrity of user interactions and surreptitiously inserts control separate from either of the communicating parties. Thus it represents one of the “fronts” in this key struggle.”
Google says it has already banned 192 Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users based on this research and it is now using the same techniques the researchers used to scan all new and updated extensions in the Chrome Web Store.
Google’s advertising and browser extension policies pretty much ban deceptive ad injectors — as do most other ad networks — but most of the companies that build them aren’t exactly about following the rules. It’s also worth noting that ad networks often also don’t know that their ads are being used in this way.
Unless Google and other browser and advertising vendors find a technical solution to this problem, chances are it’ll never fully go away.

By: Unknown On 12:36

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