Surveillance State

YouTube's new 'nocookie' feature continues to serve cookies

Responding to criticism from privacy activists, YouTube in the past two weeks has rolled out a number of new privacy features. Chief among these is a "delayed cookie" option thatYouTube promises will not leave cookies in the browsers of users who have not yet clicked the "play" button to view a video.

While this statement is true for traditional Web browser-based cookies, YouTube's cookie-lite solution still leaves long-term, non-session Flash cookies behind in the Web browser of visitors who have yet to actually click play to watch the YouTube videos.

As revealed on this blog yesterday, YouTube has recently more

Is the White House changing its YouTube tune?

Editors' note: Correction, March 3, 12:46 p.m. PST: This post, which originally carried the headline "White House ditches YouTube after privacy complaints," significantly misconstrued the White House's policy on and use of YouTube. In the interests of disclosure and transparency, we are leaving the contents as originally posted, with two subsequent update notes and with the exception of the headline change. See also our follow-up story, "No, the White House hasn't ditched YouTube."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * Original story follows * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Updated at 5:50 p.m. PST March 2: The New York Times is reporting that the White House has

Recovery.gov blocked search engine tracking

Update: As of 8 a.m. PST, within three hours of this story first going live, it appears that President Obama's Web team has (silently) pulled the robots.txt file from the Recovery.gov Web site. The site is now open to Web crawlers of all kinds.

The Obama administration has apparently opted to forbid Google and other search engines from indexing any content on the newly launched Recovery.gov.

Is this even more evidence that the administration's much-publicized commitment to transparency is simply hype?

Recovery.gov, which went live Tuesday, is set to act as a central more

Obama's BlackBerry brings personal safety risks

When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's "victory" in keeping his BlackBerry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the U.S. president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers.

The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location.

Serial numbers
Before we dive in, let's take a moment to note that

White House expands use of search-blocking code

The White House has silently tripled the number of Web pages that it forbids Google and other search engines from accessing. Is this a bad omen or much ado about nothing?

Within hours of Barack Obama being sworn in as president, bloggers and tech journalists began to closely examine the new White House Web site for hidden indicators as to how he would shape future tech policy.

While I focused my efforts on the White House privacy policy, others looked to the new administration's robots.txt file, which lays out boundaries that search engines like Google should follow when more

Activists call for a mashup-friendly Recovery.gov

As President Obama's $825+ billion financial stimulus package works its way through Congress, a number of groups have started to call for increased transparency in the way that data on the proposed spending will be shared with citizens.

Most noteworthy are demands from public-interest groups and academics that the the data be provided in a format conducive to user-generated mashups and remixes.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed through the House Appropriations Committee a couple weeks ago, and it is expected to come up for a full House vote in the coming weeks.

In addition to more

White House yanks 'YouTube' from privacy policy

Someone at the White House appears to be listening to those of us in the privacy community.

For the third time in just six days, the Obama administration has modified the White House Web site privacy policy in response to criticism from the blogosphere.

When the site launched on January 20, it exempted YouTube from federal anticookie tracking rules that would have otherwise cast a legal shadow over the use of embedded videos on the White House blog.

Reacting to criticism from the blogosphere, the White House first modified its Web site on Friday to limit the cookie exposure to more

White House acts to limit YouTube cookie tracking

Just 12 hours after this blog highlighted the privacy problems associated with the White House's use of embedded YouTube videos, the Obama team rushed to deploy a technical fix that significantly protects the privacy of many (but not all) of the site's visitors.

Since its launch three days ago, President Obama's White House Web site has included several embedded YouTube videos. While this certainly demonstrates that the 44th president is Web 2.0 savvy, the decision to embed YouTube videos has also enabled the Google-owned video-sharing site to sneakily collect data on the millions of people who more

White House exempts YouTube from privacy rules

Update: 12 hours after posting this story, the White House (partially) reversed itself. The rather dubious YouTube-only waiver from federal Web privacy rules has been maintained, but the White House Web site has been updated to limit the exposure of visitors to YouTube's tracking efforts to only those people who actually click the "play" button on a YouTube video. For more details on the new changes, read this blog post.

The new Web site for Obama's White House is already drawing attention from privacy activists and tech bloggers. While the initial focus has been on the site's more

Tech policy predictions for 2009

It's that time of year again: predictions for the next 12 months, most of which are likely to be wrong, and a few that, if right, will further cement Surveillance State's status as a top tier tech blog...maybe.

President Obama will break the heart of Net neutrality activists by picking pro-telecom industry people for the FCC. On the other hand, Obama will pick someone great for the position of privacy czar, and then castrate him/her by not giving the position any power.
Comcast, AT&T and other ISPs will begin the mass deployment of monthly