The following is from the satire site, “The Onion“.
Are you tired of Google knowing your every move, every thought, want, purchase, opinion? Then Google’s new opt-out village is for you…as long as you know how to farm and bury a dead body…
There is a lot of talk going around, about the privacy issues in Internet. But no one seems to have pressed the panic button yet. There is always a possibility of a government or an organization with an evil intent to gather as much as data as possible about Internet users. A anonymous proxy can protect users from the big brother from knowing your net activities from their ISP‘s, it is of no use if they are able to get it from the user’s web browsers.
“Start Panic” is a website that basically shows the proof of concept of how websites can find out about anyone’s browsing history, just by adding some scripts. Although this site requires a button to be pressed for it to gather the browsing history, some other site can be using a code that can do it automatically. Start Panic aims to raise public awarness for this privcay issue.
This issue is little alarming for the reason that it is cross browser. It works in all major web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera. Eventhough this issue has been around for a while from 2007, none of the browsers seem to have noted or tried to fix this issue. Another alarming factor is that normal users do not clear their browser history or cookies regularly. This makes it even more a bigger privacy issue.
For now usage of add-ons like NoScript etc will protect you.
The developers back at Micro$oft have suddenly woken up to privacy concerns of their customer and decided to introduce Private Browsing a.k.a Porn Mode, in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8.
The fancy name for this feature is “InPrivate”. When activated, InPrivate won’t store new cookies, but still allows existing cookies to be read. Additionally, new history entries, search queries, form data, passwords and temporary web files will be purged at the end of the internet session. It is basically a step forward from the IE7 tool ‘Delete Browsing History’, which didn’t allow data – such as cookies from often-visited websites – to be retained if the user wanted the option. According to Micro$oft’s IEBlog, the features related with privacy would be
InPrivate Browsing: This lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data.
Delete Browsing History: This helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited Web sites.
InPrivate Blocking: This informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it. InPrivate Blocking will also warn users of third-party content which gives others information about browsing habits without using cookies, and offer to prevent communication with this type of content.
InPrivate Subscriptions: This feature allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of Web sites to block or allow.
So, if you are asking when you can get this amazing kinky feature, the next beta is expected in November by some sources…
The developers back at Micro$oft have suddenly woken up to ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7d35987a-2b10-4887-9255-1968ff8e21e1)
