Negative Space: web cookies
- Cooky Controversy
- You may have heard about the controversy over letting web sites store “cookies” in your web browser. There are privacy and security concerns over these cookies. These concerns are not as major as the detractors claim, but neither are they as minor as the boosters claim.
- New comments system live for Mimsy!
- I’ve made the new comments system live. You can now hide in all your anonymous glory and not get tracked by the Man!
- Per-header encryption
- Jeff Atwood touches on something that’s bugged me for over a decade: there is no way to do per-header encryption.
More Information
- The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
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The Wall Street Journal’s Julia Angwin has a good overview of the benefits and drawbacks of web tracking: on the one hand, it makes it easier for sites to identify you so that you don’t have to log in every time. On the other hand, web tracking compiles a lot of personal information about you and your habits.
This is especially true if you allow third-party cookies (I recommend that you not allow third party cookies unless you can articulate why you want them) and Flash (for Safari, I recommend ClickToFlash).
As you read the hysterical reactions to Angwin’s article, such as Jeff Jarvis’s, remember that when they talk about how…
