♬ I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind♬
Words and Music by Eric Woolfson, recorded by the Alan Parsons Project.
Recently my attention was drawn to a little-known feature that Yahoo.com uses both inside and outside the Yahoo network. This feature is known as "web beacons" (http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webbeacons/). A web beacon, according to Wikipedia, is a "web bug". Wikipedia states:
"A Web bug is any one of a number of techniques used to track who is reading a Web page or e-mail, when, and from what computer. They can also be used to see if an e-mail was read or forwarded to someone else, or if a Web page was copied to another Website. The first Web bugs were small images.
Some e-mails and Web pages are not wholly self-contained. They may refer to content on another server, rather than including the content directly. When an e-mail client or web browser prepares such an e-mail or Web page for display, it ordinarily sends a request to the server to send the additional content.
These requests typically include the IP address of the requesting computer, the time the content was requested, the type of Web browser that made the request, and the existence of cookies previously set by that server. The server can store all of this information, and associate it with a unique tracking token attached to the content request."
Within the Yahoo network, Yahoo states:
"Yahoo! uses web beacons within the Yahoo! network of web sites in order to count users and to recognize users by accessing Yahoo! cookies."
Outside of the Yahoo network, Yahoo states:
"Yahoo! uses web beacons to conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes.
Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report anonymous individual and/or aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners. Aggregate information may include demographic and usage information. No personally identifiable information about you is shared with partners from this research. "
The fact that companies track information should not be news for anyone. Yahoo states:
"When conducting research that collects personal information Yahoo!'s practice is to require partners to disclose the presence of web beacons in their privacy policies and state what choices are available to users regarding the collection and use of this information. You may choose to opt-out (link to opt-out page) of Yahoo! using this information."
I don't know about you, but not even lawyers make a practice of reading privacy policies on each web site that they visit. I would believe that non-lawyers are even less inclined to read these policies.
The solution is for the user to be able to turn these off *somehow*. Well, Yahoo does allow this – the problem is that you must turn it off for each browser on each computer you use to access the Internet. Yahoo states:
"Note: This opt-out applies to a specific browser rather than a specific user. Therefore you will have to opt-out separately from each computer or browser that you use."
If you wish to guard your privacy from these web beacons, you must follow the following link and click on the 'opt out' button.
Our own Michael Geist has stated on his blog:
"Given these challenges, it appears that Canada is facing a privacy crisis that can only be resolved by instituting statutory reform that creates adequate privacy safeguards. If the Prime Minister of Canada is serious about prioritizing civil rights, then decisive action must follow his strong words."
I am of the view that users should not be forced to read obscure and detailed privacy policies and resort to opting out of tracking bugs on each and every browser for every service on the Internet that they use in order to protect their personal privacy. It should not be so easy for someone to have an eye in the sky looking at you..
