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‘Do Not Track’ Internet Legislation, Advances
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California is a moving closer to making into law the first Do Not Track legislation in the U.S., aimed at protecting Internet users from invasive advertising.
The proposed Senate bill, SB-761, passed a Senate Judiciary Committee vote late Tuesday, but it still has a long road ahead before having a chance of being signed into law. It now moves on to the Appropriations Committee, and must also pass the Senate and State Assembly before being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk.
Still, it’s the first time such a bill has made it out of committee, and that’s a big deal, according to John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project. “This is the first time that a ‘do not track’ bill has actually had a hearing and been debated and then voted forward in the legislative process,” he said.
The bill would give California consumers a simple way of opting out of data collection systems that keep track of their online activities. “It puts up a no trespassing sign on our device,” Simpson said.
Opponents of the bill, including Google, the Direct Marketing Association, and the wireless industry group CTIA, say it puts an unnecessary burden on online commerce.
Online marketers love this type of data because it helps them fashion highly effective targeted advertising. But many consumers don’t want to hand marketers every detail of what they do on the Web.
Under the proposed law, users would have a way — possibly a through a browser setting — of telling Web sites not to track them. If a company disregarded this and collected data without permission, it could face stiff fines.
FTC Singles Out Google’s Chrome
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Liebowitz this week singled out Google for not adopting “Do Not Track,” the privacy feature that allows consumers the ability to opt out of online tracking by Web sites and marketing entities.
In an interview Monday with Politico, Liebowitz called out Google for not supporting Do Not Track in its Chrome browser.
Noting that Do Not Track had gathered momentum, Liebowitz said, “Apple just announced they’re going to put it in their Safari browser. So that gives you Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Really the only holdout — the only company that hasn’t evolved as much as we would like on this — is Google.”
Do Not Track has been promoted by the FTC and by privacy advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as the best way to help consumers protect their privacy.
The technology requires sites and advertisers to recognize incoming requests from browsers as an opt-out demand by the user. The information is transmitted as part of the HTTP header.
As Liebowitz said, Microsoft and Mozilla have added Do Not Track header support to their Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and Firefox 4 browsers. While Apple hasn’t confirmed that the next version of Safari will include Do Not Track, developers have reported finding the feature in early editions bundled with Mac OS X 10.7, aka “Lion,” the upgrade slated to ship this summer.
Firefox 4 Coming Next Week
Mozilla’s Firefox 4, the latest offering of the second most popular Web browser in the world, will be officially released on March 22, 2011.
It’s been a long time coming. The first Firefox 4 beta was released July 6, 2010. At the time, Mozilla was aiming to deliver a release candidate this past autumn.
Launching several months late isn’t ideal but Google’s release practices have made Firefox’s tardiness look worse. Google launched Chrome 5 on May 21, 2010. On March 8, 2011, Google released Chrome 10. Is Firefox now five generations behind Chrome? Hardly. The four major Web browsers — Chrome 10, Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, and Safari 5 — are more comparable and competitive than ever before.
Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, says Firefox has more than 400 million users worldwide and a 30% global market share.
NetApplications, an Internet metrics company, suggest that figure is closer to 22% and flat, if not falling. The most significant number Nightingale cites is six: “Firefox 4 is fast,” he said. “It’s blazing fast. Six times faster than any Firefox we’ve done before.”
Other browser makers make similar claims too, though some of those claims are more actively disputed than others, like Microsoft’s assertions about hardware acceleration. Read more……
80% Of Browsers Found To Be At Risk Of Attack
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About eight out of every ten internet browsers run by consumers are vulnerable to attack by exploits of already-patched bugs, a security expert said today.
The poor state of browser patching stunned Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, which presented data from the company’s free BrowserCheck service Wednesday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
“I really thought it would be lower,” said Kandek of the nearly 80% of browsers that lacked one or more patches.
BrowserCheck scans Windows, Mac and Linux machines for vulnerable browsers, as well as up to 18 browser plug-ins, including Adobe’s Flash and Reader, Oracle’s Java and Microsoft’s Silverlight and Windows Media Player.
When browsers and their plug-ins are tabulated together, between 90% and 65% of all consumer systems scanned with BrowserCheck since June 2010 reported at least one out-of-date component, depending on the month. In January 2011, about 80% of the machines were vulnerable. Read more….