Website monitoring practices take advantage of many loopholes in privacy regulations, UC-Berkeley study says

Jun 03, 2009 | 01:11 AM
By Tim Wilson
DarkReading

 Do you know who's tracking you when you're surfing the Web -- and what they do with the information? A new study suggests you may not know as much as you think.
The study by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley (PDF), which was released late Monday, indicates that Web users may be tracked ("bugged," as the researchers put it) by dozens of sources on a visit to a single site. In a single month, they found 100 monitoring agents on one site, blogspot.com.

While many of the trackers used on blogging sites are low-level monitors used by bloggers to see who's reading their content, the big companies -- such as Google -- are also tracking a large portion of Web traffic, the report says. "We found five trackers overall operated by Google, including Analytics, DoubleClick, AdSense, FriendConnect, and Widgets," the researchers say. [Comments...]