Circumventing internet tracking software




















Some copyright owners embed a form of DRM into their digital work in order to control its use and distribution. Typically, copyright controls come in two flavors:.

The DMCA prohibits circumventing access-control measures. For example, if you cannot watch a particular copyrighted DVD on your laptop because of an encryption system, the DMCA makes it unlawful for you to bypass this access-control measure.

Access-control measures may also be found on eBooks, Internet streaming platforms, and password-protected sections of websites, among other things.

Note that there is no ban on the act of circumventing copy-control measures, but it is illegal for anyone to provide you with the technological tools to do so. In any event, some copyright holders merge access-control and copy-control measures in the same DRM system, making it impossible to circumvent copy-controls which is not prohibited without circumventing access-controls which is prohibited.

The DMCA also prohibits trafficking in devices or tools that help other people circumvent access-control and copy-control measures. Beware: you can "traffic" in circumvention tools simply by posting them on your website or linking to other websites that host them.

For example, in a Norwegian teenager created a software program called "DeCSS" that allowed users to circumvent CSS, the encryption technology used by movie studios to stop unlicensed playing and copying of commercially distributed DVDs. A number of websites posted the source and object code for DeCSS on the Internet, and other websites linked to them.

See Universal City Studios, Inc. Corley , F. This decision is controversial, and it is not clear that other courts would necessarily follow its reasoning. Nevertheless, it illustrates how risky it is to host or even link to devices or tools that enable others to break access- and copy-controls.

Fair use is not a defense to a prohibited act of circumvention or trafficking. It does not matter that you or someone else has to circumvent DRM in order to make fair use of a copyrighted work. Modern websites use cookies for two main purposes - keeping you logged in and tracking your behavior. When you log in to a website, like Facebook, your browser sends it a message again in the form of an HTTP request with your username and password. If this login request is successful, the response will typically instruct your browser to set a cookie containing a long, random session ID.

Facebook saves the fact that it assigned you this session ID to its database, and so when your browser appends it to future requests to Facebook, it immediately knows and trusts who you are without having to explicitly ask you for your password again.

Without a mechanism like the cookie, you would have to enter your username and password for every single request that you sent to Facebook. It would be like having to get a new security card every time you wanted to go into your office. If you delete your Facebook cookies then its as though you incinerated your ID card.

If you copied my cookies and saved them on your computer which is not hard - remember, they are just text files , then as far as Facebook is concerned, you are me. This is why your browser has to make sure not to expose your cookies to the wrong people - knowing my cookies is like cloning my ID card.

It is possible for websites to monitor their traffic without using cookies. All they have to do is look at their server logs and see how many requests their server received. But cookies make tracking even more powerful and personal. If they can group together activity by the same user then they can better understand how individual users are interacting with their site.

How many pages are they viewing each visit? How often do they come back? This might be in order to improve their product, massage their egos or serve targeted ads. If a website requires its users to log in then they can easily be identified by their existing login cookies. The website can therefore already see everything that their users do without having to perform any extra work. They can use these IDs to map requests to users, count up all the pages that Alice, Bob and Eve requested last Tuesday and start drawing graphs.

They are unlikely to want to bother looking at exactly which pages Alice looked at at exactly what time, and probably have some amount of access-control to keep the user-by-user data private. This information is generated as a direct by-product of your requests to load a website, and the only way you can prevent it from being collected is to not visit the website in the first place. Even websites that do not require users to log in to any systems such as news sites, shops or blogs can still collect this kind of behavioral data.

They can still set a cookie on your device when you first load the website, containing a randomly generated ID eg. Your browser will append this cookie and the ID inside it to every request it sends to their domain, just as it did for the logged-in session ID cookie. The website can therefore use this ID to link together your activity in a similar way to that of a logged-in user. They can use this information for almost any purpose they like, from improving their site to massaging prices.

In practice, websites usually track non-logged in users in using external, third-party software like Google Analytics or AdRoll. These specialized trackers are typically much more powerful and easier to manage than handling tracking in-house, and come in two main flavors: single- and multi-website trackers.

Single-website trackers like Google Analytics keep the data of each of their client websites siloed and isolated from each other. They are therefore much more powerful, with many rather discomforting integrations with other data stores that can help websites learn more about otherwise anonymous users. Many people object to being tracked by third-party software of any kind in any way. Personally, as long as my behavioral data is only being stored by these third-parties, and is not shared with other companies, I am relatively happy.

However, there are many third-party trackers that are dedicated to tracking and connecting your behavior across multiple, unrelated websites. Industry backlash? A YouPorn. Latest news Halloween: digital marketing campaigns we loved this year AI case study: Nutella create unique product designs — at scale AI case study: IBM Watson takes over video editing.

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