Digital Google Hit-Men; Post St. Valentine's Day Safari Browser Massacre

on Friday, 17 February 2012. Posted in Public Relations Blog

I hadn’t finished all of the Whitman's chocolates I received for Valentine's Day, when I came across this Wall Street Journal article, “Google's iPhone Tracking - Web Giant, Others Bypassed Apple Browser Settings For Guarding Privacy,” written by Julia Anguin and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, on February 17, 2012. In essence, the story details how Google has been sending digital hit-men to Apple’s Safari Web browser. The article points out how Google is bypassing the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari Web browser on their iPhones and computers. And they're doing this in a very sneaky and underhanded way:

  1. Leverage ads on Google's network to insert an "iframe" identifying if the Web surfer is using Safari.
  2. If they are using Safari, insert an invisible form into the iframe container.
  3. Unbeknownst to the Web surfer, the Google code fills out a form, on behalf of the surfer, and labels it as "submitted."
  4. The submitted form enables Safari to act as though the Web surfer has given 100% approval to add tracking cookies to the iPhone or MAC.
  5. Now that the lid is pried open to the “cookie” jar, other ads can then fill it up with additional cookies – all without the Web surfer knowing.

To me, it's as if Google is driving up to my mailbox, pulling out a bank credit card application form and filling it out using their return address. It's a new form of digital mail fraud, the same thing the federal government leveraged to charge Al Capone with tax evasion in 1929.

As I've stated before in these blogs, I am a big Google fan and also a big Google calendar, documents, Chrome and Google+ user. Although these applications are free to use, I do not want to be taking advantage of for using them. And if Google is going through these stealthy maneuvers to manipulate Safari, I have to wonder what they're doing to their own services to manipulate me.

We are living in a new Roaring Twenties age that has brought about monumental changes in the way individuals interact with each other and share data—all while making companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others very rich. They don't need to be sending digital hit-men to massacre my browser and extort Web surfing habits. Perhaps the next version of security software should be called Eliot Ness.

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