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| Microsoft disables 'supercookies' used on MSN.com visitors |
| Thursday, 01 September 2011 15:12 |
Accor ding to Microsoft officials, the company has successfully disabled an online tracking technology. According to a Stanford University researcher, this technology enabled the company to track MSN users without their knowledge.
This was possible even when the users deleted the cookies and other identifying methods. Mike Hintze who is the company’s associate general counsel in an email sent on Thursday said that the company took immediate action when it became knowledgeable about these supercookies through the University researcher Jonathan Mayer. When Mayer identified Microsoft as one of the numerous corporations that utilize supercookies as a targeted marketing strategy, the officials investigated this report. According to Hintze, the company found that the cookies were activated under some circumstances resulting due to an older code that was scheduled for discontinuation.In addition, he said that the research by the University researcher quickened the process. Hintze said that the information procured through the cookie identifier was never shared with anyone outside the company. Mayer’s report is a continuation of a report by University of California, Berkeley that showed several companies using mechanisms to track users overcoming the privacy settings enabled by the users. According to the Berkeley researchers numerous companies, such as Hulu, utilized supercookies mechanisms to track users for their advertising strategies. However, a Hulu spokeswoman did not comment on the report by UC Berkeley. Instead she directed the attention towards a Hulu blog post earlier in the month that mentioned immediate action to address the concerns found in the report. The blog post said that the company would suspend the use of its services to any outside vendor mentioned within the UC Berkeley report. Supercookies are tracking methods that do not require the browser cookies to store the users’ browsing history. Some of these supercookies include Flash cookies, which uses an unknown Adobe Flash plug-in to store the information. Moreover, the cookies use cache cookies to store the entity tags that are used by the browser to save the bandwidth. These types of cookies are popular with several Internet marketers and web analytics companies. This is because the supercookies cannot be eliminated with ease, do not automatically expire, and stores huge amounts of data. As an example an HTTP cookie stores up to 4KB of data. In comparison, the Flash cookies are able to store approximately 100KB information. The supercookies are controversially used to recreate or re-spawn those cookies that have been removed by users several years ago. |