Source: Alan Levine/flickr
Reuters reports that the F.C.C. found Verizon’s wireless unit guilty of violating the privacy of its users by employing tech dubbed supercookies: tracking headers, or codes, inserted into web traffic to individually identify customers to both Verizon and, more importantly, advertisers. The case goes back to March 2015, when several U.S. senators sounded the alarm about Verizon’s practice of allowing consumers to opt out of having their traffic tracked, and becoming subject to supercookie technology. The F.C.C. has determined that supercookies violate user privacy by overriding consumer privacy practices set on web browsers, and said Verizon failed to disclose the fact that it was using this technology from late 2012 to 2014, which also violates a 2010 F.C.C. regulation on internet transparency.
The identifiers go by terms other than supercookies, i.e., perma-cookies, tracking headers, and others. But mostly they have been a controversial technology over the last few years as privacy advocates, consumer rights groups, and some government agencies have gone after big tech businesses that employ them to better target advertising. Studies conducted have shown that some wireless web browsers reveal user phone numbers to advertisers, and mostly have focused on the notion of consent policies — something Verizon has now agreed to adopt as policy…
…The rest of this article lives on Blouin News. Read it here.
