tracking

Wireless carriers say they received 1.3 million requests last year from law enforcement agencies for subscriber text messages, caller locations, and other information, reflecting a steady increase during the past five years.

Carriers' responses to a congressional inquiry, as reported by the New York Times, reveal that thousands of records were turned over on a daily basis in response to law enforcement emergencies, subpoenas, and other court orders.

Nine carriers supplied reports in response to the inquiry, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The number of requests addressed by the study -- the first time law enforcement'… Read more

So, Orbitz has spilled the beans, well some of them, and says it in essence up-sells to people based on which browser they use.

The site told The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that it discovered that Mac users tend to pay as much as 30 percent more for hotel rooms. (Well, they are paying a premium for the computer too so it's not that surprising, although $20 to $30 more is significant.) Leveraging that information, Orbitz decided to experiment with displaying pricier hotels in search results to Mac users than to Windows users. Before you get too miffed, … Read more

A reader commenting on a Q&A about the rise in behavioral tracking for targeted advertising asked a great question: How does one browse sensitive subjects without being tracked via cookies?

For most Web activities, many people won't be bothered that they are served up ads for cars or even acne cream if they have been reading news about the newest Tesla or visiting dermatology Web sites. But what about when someone is researching a hereditary or embarrassing medical condition that one would not want revealed to advertisers, shoulder surfers or, worse yet, insurance companies?

Private Mode You … Read more

Web sites are increasingly targeting ads at visitors based on behavioral data collected via cookies and other tracking techniques behind the scenes. This riles privacy advocates and many consumers, but there's no question it will become even more widespread.

Since November 2010, behavioral tracking has increased 400 percent, according to a new study from Krux, a firm that helps Web sites manage customer data. The average visit to a Web site in December triggered 56 instances of data collection, up from 10 instances in Nov. 2010, the company found after crawling pages on the 50 most-visited sites measured by … Read more

The first in a series of meetings to decide concrete enforcement terms for President Obama's digital "Privacy Bill of Rights" has just been announced for July 12, 2012, and its focus is on mobile apps.

The National Communications and Telecommunication Administration (U.S. Department of Commerce) has decided that it's time to put President Obama's Privacy Bill of Rights into practice.

To begin, they've just invited all "privacy stakeholders" to "generate robust input" for the first consumer data transparency code of conduct.

NTIA has selected mobile app transparency as the … Read more

Once in a while there's a big change, and Western Digital is having one of its own.

The major storage vendor today unveiled not a new hard drive or NAS server, but its very first networking devices in the My Net family. There are five routers and one Gigabit Ethernet switch, enough to challenge other major home-networking vendors, such as Cisco, D-Link, Trendnet, and Netgear.

Unlike other networking vendors whose lineups tend to start with a budget single-band router, WD starts with the My Net N600, a true dual-band router that offers 300Mbps on both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands. The next step is the My Net N750, which also offers the 450Mbps speed on the 5GHz band, and finally there's the top-tier My Net N900, which offers the 450Mbps data rate on both bands. The My Net N900 also notably comes with seven Gigabit LAN ports (as opposed to the four ports found in most wireless routers). All of these routers work with any existing Wi-Fi clients.… Read more

Writefit Software Suite offers you four programs combined in one package, but we weren't all that impressed with the individual programs or the overall design. And users should be prepared for quite a bit of data entry to get the suite set up.

The application's initial interface is very plain but easily understood. You're presented with four large buttons, one for each of the programs: Web Address Book, Data Confidential, ChequeWealth, and TimeWatch. There's also a smaller button to help you get started that guides you through each program. Understanding how to use the program shouldn'… Read more

The news sounded bad for Microsoft. Barely six days after the company announced an aggressive stance on blocking advertisers from tracking you in the coming Internet Explorer 10, a new standards draft from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) appeared to kill the plan.

Except the new standards for the Do Not Track (DNT) browser header did nothing of the sort.

Microsoft's Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch told CNET in a statement, "We are engaged with the W3C, as we are with many international standards bodies. While we respect the W3C's perspective, we believe that a standard … Read more

Microsoft faces a tough time trying to pull off its goal of setting IE10's Do Not Track feature as the default.

The Do Not Track, or DNT, feature in a browser is supposed to send a signal to third-party Web sites, telling them not to track your Internet activity. Most browsers include this as an option that the user can turn on or off.

Microsoft wants to turn the feature on by default in Internet Explorer 10, seeing it as a necessary step in giving users more control over how their online activities are tracked, shared, and used. But … Read more