Codebreaker

Websites ditch cookies

John Moe Nov 9, 2010

The Wall Street Journal reports on the move of major websites to get rid of technologies that track users, like cookies. MSNBC, The Huffington Post and others have been looking more closely at the kind of tracking tools that are collecting user information without their knowledge; they’re concerned about privacy issues, and in some cases, the big sites would rather have that information themselves because it’s worth a lot of money.

From the Journal:

A new study by technology start-up Krux Digital Inc. found that nearly a third of the tracking tools on 50 popular U.S. websites were installed by companies that gained access to the site without the publisher’s permission.

On average, visiting a single page on those sites resulted in 10 trackers being installed or updated on the visitor’s computer. Krux found some pages installed or updated 40 trackers.

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