Software Giant, Microsoft announced that the controversial “supercookies” have been eliminated which have existed earlier on MSN.com. This step was taken in order to revert to the user-tracking technique which was detailed via a research. These ‘supercookies’ are not like any common cookies or the Flash cookies which can be disabled by the browser users. Even the add-ons for privacy would not be of use in this case as these cookies are the new generation tracking technologies. This was revealed via two separate research papers in the last month.
Jonathan R. Mayer, Stanford University graduate student wrote “Tracking the Trackers: Microsoft Advertising (cache and ETag supercookies),” which was the first paper. It was to highlight that Microsoft was using its MSN.com site to keep track of cookies via new techniques. The reply to the above was expected and Microsoft said that they are looking into the matter and the investigation for the assertions made by Mayer were done and accordingly the codes were identified and later on disabled. This reply came in July itself. Microsoft’s associate general counsel for regulatory affairs, Mike Hintze stated that Mayer’s observation on the cookies was seen in a few circumstances and was a result of the older codes which were used by the software giant’s in house sites. He assured that the codes in question were now disabled.
Hintze continued saying that the functionality did not let out any Microsoft cookie identifier. Even the associated data was not shares out of the Microsoft office. He said that they have not planned of deploying or developing any mechanism which relates to such ‘supercookie’.
However, later on it was known that the ETag supercookies’ use was not restricted to just Microsoft. This was known when after Mayer, another researcher group made a paper, detailing techniques which were quite similar to that of the first. This paper was released even in the last month as “Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning.” Ashkan Soltani,The report’s co-author blogged
in a post that were in the process of recreation of their 2009 study when they came across the new tracking techniques. The usage of such a technique was usually adopted by those online advertisers who along with their affiliate partners look out for tracking the online behavior.
This new research had resulted in identifying 5,600 HTTP cookie which were brought in use by popular sites. The stats said that the third parties had counted for 88%. Soltani added that the cookies run by Google had even had their share which among the top 100 websites were in 97. This even included websites which were based for the government. Again, Flash cookies counted for 37 in the 100 top website list. the newly-in, HTML5 was even used in 17 sites out of which 7 made use of “HTML5 local storage and HTTP cookies with matching values.”
‘Supercookies’ cannot be stopped from one’s browser, but one can block them. However, it is not an easy task as there is a requirement for a specific type of privacy legislation which would compel US businesses to respect the “do not track” intention of a user. It would even prevent them from disclosing the company’s tracking techniques.