Oct 5, 2013

Jen King Talks with New York Times about Online Tracking and Mobile Privacy

From The New York Times

Selling Secrets of Phone Users to Advertisers

By Claire Cain Miller and Somini Sengupta

SAN FRANCISCO — Once, only hairdressers and bartenders knew people’s secrets.

Now, smartphones know everything — where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualized, hypertargeted ads. And they are doing it without cookies, those tiny bits of code that follow users around the Internet, because cookies don’t work on mobile devices....

“People don’t understand tracking, whether it’s on the browser or mobile device, and don’t have any visibility into the practices going on,” said Jennifer King, who studies privacy at the University of California, Berkeley [School of Information]  and has advised the Federal Trade Commission on mobile tracking. “Even as a tech professional, it’s often hard to disentangle what’s happening.”...

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016