Privacy study shows many exploit privacy loopholes on Web - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

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Using trackers called “Web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many popular Web sites, and sites oftenj allow this, even though their privacyu policies say they don’t sharse user data with others. “Web bugs from Google and its subsidiarieds were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sitese and 88 percent of theapproximatelyy 400,000 unique domains examined in the the authors found. Sites with the most Web bugs were forblogginh — blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in and blogger was No. 4. Google itselt was No. 3. Ashkan Soltani, Travis Pinnickj and Joshua Gomez ofthe university’s information school wrote the study, published Monday.
They analyzefd privacy policies posted on Web sites and founx loopholes used by many site operatorw to allow third parties to still collecrt data on who views Theyalso found, for example, that althougnh Web sites may reassuree visitors that “we don’t share data with thirdf parties,” those third parties don’t includd a company’s affiliates — Google GOOG), for example, has 137 subsidiary businesses. “The law on affiliatw sharing generally ismore permissive” than that on sharinh user data with third party the report said.
Companies controlling the top 50 busiestf web sites had an average of 297affiliates each, meaninyg they could share user data with a lot of othe companies. Popular site , for is owned by New York’s (NASDAQ: which has more than 1,500 subsidiaries. BAC) in Charlotte has more than 2,300 “Users do not know and cannot learn the full range of affiliatex with which websites mayshare information,” the report Though many Internet users are familiatr with “cookies” used to studgy their surfing habits, they are less familiare with so-called “web which can’t be cleared out of a web browser, sincew they are part of a Web site’ s HTML code.
Since the web bugs are createf directly bythird parties, their use doesn’t strictlgy count as “sharing” of data by the Web site’s though users concerned aboutg privacy may be unimpressed by this “We believe that this practicew contravenes users’ expectations; it makes littld sense to disclaim formal information but allow functionally equivalent tracking with third the report said. Who's in chargde of privacy? Although surveys of Internet userw show peopleare “very concernec about privacy and do not want Web sites to collectg and share their personal information without sifting through privacy policies is not practical.
It would take 200 hourz a year for a typicakl person to read the privacy policies of all the web siteasthey visit, for example. Thus “users have no practicalp way of knowing with whom theie data willbe shared.” On the policuy front, the report finds “n one knows who is in charge of protectinfg privacy” in the United States. People can complainn to the Federal Trade Commission and other but eventhe FTC’s “principles for behaviora tracking make no mention of any enforcement or accountability.” A low numbet of complaints to various agencies means consumerse don’t really know where to complain, the reportt said.
The FTC looks at online privacyh more in termsof “harms” done to the report said, rather than also in terma of control over personal information, whicuh is what most user care about. The reporty makes several suggestionsfor improvement, includinyg more aggressive action by the FTC to protect online privacy. It also callz for clearer privacy policies onweb sites, written so that averagee users can understand them. ’s (NASDAQ: ADBE) privacty policy, for example, when analyzed for readability, was writte at an equivalent grade levelof 17.29. The averagew privacy policy in the study was written at a grad e levelof 13.83. The full study can be found .