comScore sued over 'sinister' data collection methods Data collection outfit comScore has rejected a lawsuit that alleges the company violates US privacy laws, by saying the claims are "without merit and full of factual inaccuracies". On Tuesday, a suit (30-page PDF/270KB) was filed in the US District Court, Northern District of Illinois, by Chicago-based law firm Edelson McGuire …
> we make commercially viable efforts to automatically
> filter confidential personally identifiable information
> such as UserID, password, credit card numbers, and account numbers
They admit that they can take the most private of personal information - but they, uh, what?
They make "commercially viable" efforts. WTF is "commercially viable"???
They "filter" (but not block)?
What kind of moron would install their software, anyway???
I understand that compared to the average 'Reg Reader' the rest of the planet are mere lusers but I do hope you realise that there are more of them than you and part of the subset will include your mum and other family 'morons' that you really should care about..... apart from the dickhead who married your sister.
ComScore [I assume part of that will be Beacon] and the rest only exist because the world, as you describe it, is inhabited by morons. I might be certain that is their opinion of their marks as well.
Their 'garbage' as you so nicely put it is probably inside some other bit of bloatware so you don't get any option to install it.
For example, an HP Printer driver kit I saw recently is 340Mb. All sorts of crapware got instaled automatically. Some of it was uninstallable by normal means are required registry hack and a forced reboot to get it out removed.
One of the reasons why we run a Linux print Server. Anyone found installing a printer driver is sent to the naughty step while their PC is re-imaged.
Only a total dumbass would install the printer driver from the disk that came with the printer.
Always go to the web site and download the minimal driver.
"For example, an HP Printer driver kit I saw recently is 340Mb. All sorts of crapware got instaled automatically. Some of it was uninstallable by normal means are required registry hack and a forced reboot to get it out removed."
"commercially viable efforts to automatically filter confidential personally identifiable information such as UserID, password, credit card numbers, and account numbers ..... we make commercially viable efforts to purge our database of such information"
= If it costs money, we won't do it
Simples
"it monitors ... and the activity that you undertake during secure sessions"
No legitimate application should ever be monitoring secure sessions - the *whole point* of them is to keep the information private.
Saying they'll make a vague stab at not really storing a few of the secure bits is *not good enough* - that data should never have been collected in the first place. Any application that even tries to monitor it is by definition a rogue.
I'm not a programmer, and even I know that the html header contains a few easy to find fields (like referer) and that everything after the header (and some things in badly designed headers) is likely to be PII. Does anyone know if a user can sign away their rights in this fashion?
'nuff said.
What bugs me more than someone exploiting this fact is that there is no law that prevents this.
A salesman that enters my home uninvited or even puts a shoe in the door has broken a law and knows it.
If I buy a baby phone with video surveillance (yep, that exists really...) and the company selling it syphons of the whole video and audio feed, for quality insurance or whatever reason they claim, will be sued into oblivion.
If someone hides in a contract a clause that obliges the signer to things that have no relevance to the main contract the clause will be ruled invalid.
But your computer obviously is not considered "private space" per se. Nobody is willing to apply rules based on the same moral standards to your computer and the inherent "cyber property" than is applied to your other, "real world" property.
So installing spyware on my computer bundled with a totally unrelated, necessary tool or service and obscuring this fact enough that the intent to fool me is obvious, stealing data I never would give up voluntarily (else they would just ask!) and selling it to other businesses that use said data to harass me with unsolicited shite is obviously not a crime.
After all, If you are stupid enough to fall for it, nana nana na-na.
And right there's your solution. Educate your family and friends, spread the word. Its all you can do.
Until the old generation of "law makers" and "law keepers", for which simply using a computer is already a challenge and that simply won't learn enough to see the whole picture anymore, has stepped down this will not change. Give it 15 years or so until most of them are replaced with a generation that has never seen a world without computers (and can't even imagine it), and things will be different.
... just not sure exactly HOW different.
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