How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the Government and What It Means for Your Online Privacy

[Glia]

How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the Government and What It Means for Your Online Privacy
Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.

A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office, Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google.

This is precisely the type of privacy violation the Federal Trade Commission aims to protect consumers from, and Google now reportedly faces a fine of more than $10 million. Yet it was Mayer—a 25-year-old student working on law and computer science degrees at Stanford University—who discovered the breach, not the FTC.

Read the rest on Mother Jones:
https://www.motherjones.com/media/20...acy-regulation