It’s not in Microsoft, Google, or Apple’s interest to create browsers that serve me first and advertisers second. But as the Journal series makes apparent, too many Web entrepreneurs observe no limits when they decide to snoop. They deliver advertising that might interest me. Cookies make “logging in” to a Web site possible. I’m not an anti-cookie raver who insists on invisibility every time I prowl the Web. This spying has become so rampant that even Web giants like Comcast and Microsoft aren’t always aware of every powerful tracking cookie they drop on users’ computers, as this report from the Journal series shows. These companies and others make browsing the Web akin to walking down a block with 47 security cameras peering into your wallet and psyche. This piece reports the comeback of “deep packet inspection,” which profiles Internet users based on the data generated by their Web surfing. For instance, this Journal piece shows how InfoCheckUSA “scrapes” social-media data and markets them to companies that are assessing job applicants. They then sell this information to other firms. They aggressively spy on Web users, building dossiers on your likes and dislikes, your gender, your income level, your place of residence, and even your health. The best journalism about how marketers hunt and record your journeys into Cyberia can be found in the Wall Street Journal’s ongoing What They Know series. And hand-in-hand with those advertisements have been the privacy-complicating cookies that track where you are, time how long you stay, note what you do, and then follow you where you go on the Web. Since the early days of the Web, the top players have been aboveboard about the ultimate costs of free browsers and free content: advertisements. I don’t mean to imply a software-advertising conspiracy. In the case of Internet Explorer 8, the Microsoft product planners were overruled-the automatic privacy guard settings were canceled, to the great pleasure of the advertising industry. Its fellow browser-builders went on advertising-company shopping sprees of their own: Google purchased DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2007 and AdMob for $750 million in 2009, and Apple bought AdMob competitor Quattro Wireless this year for $275 million. After all, Microsoft blew $6 billion on the purchase of the Web-ad firm aQuantive in 2007. 2, 2010, Wall Street Journal article “Microsoft Quashed Effort to Boost Online Privacy.” The piece documents how Microsoft product planners wanted to bake security features into the company’s Internet Explorer 8 Web browser that would “automatically thwart common tracking tools,” as the Journal reports.īut Microsoft executives were keen on selling advertising. The best illustration of who is driving Web-browser development can be found in the Aug. But it hasn’t been in their interests to make impregnable ones. Where wondering how long the Chinese are going to tolerate his thing.None of the software companies set out to make porous, easily breached browsers. But that can be a double-edged sword, too, turning off people who dislike Microsoft. Executives say that lets it add value to the browser through features like tabbed and parallel browsing. At very bottom of the story, we find out: Maxthon is built on top of the IE engine, removing it from direct competition with the software giant. The future of Maxthon is allowing people to customize it into their own information portal, Jacobsson said.īut wait. They’ll also be able to copy and paste text from one page to another without switching screens. This summer, Maxthon will release a new version, Maxthon 2.0, that will include parallel browsing, similar to the picture-in-picture feature on TVs, in which surfers can browse several sites in parallel. It also has a development platform for plug-ins that inspires hundreds of techies to create add-ons for the browser. It’s highly customizable with hundreds of “skins,” and it includes tabbed browsing, baked-in RSS detection and readers, and remote-file access in partnership with software company Avvenu. This caught our eye too: It includes filters to zap all Web ads, including pop-ups - a valuable feature for the typically cluttered environments of Chinese Web pages. And Bill, we know you are probably out there surfing care-free, but get ready for persona non grata status by the Chinese. It works, the CNET story says, by funneling traffic through a Web proxy and thus circumventing government controls on information in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and (snark insert: though we’re not sure how much sensitive information these sites are carrying anymore anyway). CNET now reports that one reason Chinese are turning to it is to avoid censorship.
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