through Flickr user bsabarnowl
Welcome to one more edition of yellow journalism with Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal. The reporter who brought you the “WhatThey Know” series has got Google with its pants down. The WSJ discovered that Google managed to get temporary tracking cookies assigned to people making use of Safarion the iPhone and iPad, even even though each Apple and Google told shoppers that Safari, by default, blocked this kind of activity.
When it was informed of this story, Google altered its method and deleted text from its web site, which tends to make it look extremely guilty.
At the danger of becoming seen as an apologist for culture of tracking, the dark side of web supported by advertising (that’s how Google pays the bills, bear in mind), this story glosses over a lot of crucial specifics in its rush to judgement. The story’s 1st paragrpah declares that Google “tricked” Apple’s software program into letting them track users, which sounds fairly dark on the face of it.
John Battelle has an exciting take on this, “Google and several other folks have figured out techniques to get around Apple’s default settings on Safari in iOS – the only browser that comes with iOS, a browser that, in my experience, has never ever asked me what kind of privacy settings I wanted, nor did it ask if I wanted to share my data with everyone else (I do, it turns out, for any number of perfectly very good causes). Apple assumes that I agree with Apple’s point of view on “privacy,” which, I should say, is ridiculous on its face, since the concept of a big corporation (Apple is the largest, in reality) determining in advance what I may possibly want to do with my data is fairly significantly the opposite of privacy.”
Oh, and right here’s one more exciting tidbit. There appears to be two version of this story floating about on the WSJ’s site. One is co-bylined by Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries. That’s the story at the moment causing an uproar. Then there is one more piece by Valentino-DeVries which covers the exact same material, but dives into more technical detail. The last paragraph of that story reads, “An update to the software that underlies Safari has closed the loophole that makes it possible for cookies to be set after the automatic submission of invisible forms. Future public versions of Safari could incorporate that update. The individuals who handled the proposed adjust, according to software program documents: two engineers at Google.”
That update took place seven months ago.
At Google, 1 hand frequently doesn’t know what the other is undertaking. Although the advertising team was exploiting a loophole to get tracking cookies in Safari, yet another set of Google engineers were closing the loophole. That seems like a fact worth mentioning, particularly considering that they squashed this bug in Safari’s settings much more than half a year just before this story came out.
Filed below: mobile 
