[Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

[Gregory Maxwell]

This paper is making the rounds:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862

"This is a pilot study of the use of “Flash cookies” by popular
websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are
using flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are
using it to "respawn" or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the
user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and
are even used on government websites to assign unique values to users.
Privacy policies rarely disclose the presence of Flash cookies, and
user controls for effectuating privacy preferences are lacking. "

Inside it says:

"We encountered Flash cookies on 54 of the top 100 sites. […]
Ninety-eight of the top 100 sites set HTTP cookies (only wikipedia and
wikimedia.org lacked HTTP cookies in our tests). These 98 sites set a
total of 3,602 HTTP cookies."


Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking.  Other
people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
of user-invisible behavior.