Washington Post:
Google Inc. agreed to pay a record $22.5 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it breached Apple Inc.’s Safari Internet browser.
The fine, the largest ever the FTC has levied against a company, represents the first by the agency for a violation of Internet privacy as the agency steps up enforcement of consumers’ online rights.
Chump change.
Google agrees to pay $22.5M for Apple browser breach
WSJ:
Google Inc. is close to a deal to pay $22.5 million to settle charges related to its surreptitious bypassing of the privacy settings of millions of Apple Inc. users, according to officials briefed on the settlement terms.
Don’t be Evil…or don’t get caught.
Google, FTC Near Settlement on Privacy
Google Inc. (GOOG) is negotiating with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how big a fine it will have to pay for its breach of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Safari Internet browser, a person familiar with the matter said.
The fine could amount to more than $10 million dollars, said the person, who declined to be identified because the talks are confidential. The fine would be the first by the FTC for a violation of Internet privacy as the agency steps up enforcement of consumers’ online rights.
“Don’t be Evil”.
Google Inc. (GOOG) will allow a “do-not- track” button to be embedded in its Web browser, letting users restrict the amount of data that can be collected about them.
The world’s most popular search engine will join with other Web companies to support the anti-tracking initiative, which prevents an individual’s browsing history from being used to tailor ads, according to an e-mailed statement today.
Welcome to the party Google, you’re late, Safari and Firefox already do this. Better late than never I guess.
When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from Google with the use of IE9′s Tracking Protection feature. We’ve also contacted Google and asked them to commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.
We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.
According to Cult of Mac:
In Safari on the Mac or iPhone, there is an option to always block cookies from third parties and advertisers, but Apple makes an exception on pages where a user has interacted with it in some way: by, say, filling out a form. So what Google did was make sure that any time someone did a Google search or accessed one of their pages, Safari would automatically send an invisible form to Google, which would then allow them to install a tracking cookie on any iOS device or Mac even against that user’s explicit privacy settings. And once that initial cookie got installed, things snowballed, because a glitch in Safari then allows an unlimited number of subsequent cookies to be added.
Apple on their part is pissed, and told the Wall Street Journal that it is working to put a stop to Google’s shenanigans. But Google’s unapologetic, saying that they used “known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled” and that “these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.”
Don’t be Evil??
