
New Form Of HTML5 Cookies Now Tracking iOS Devices - xonder
http://appadvice.com/appnn/2010/09/form-html5-cookies-tracking-ios-devices/
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trun
Simply clearing cookies has never been an effective way to keep yourself
anonymous online. Between HTML5's DOM storage, Flash's Local Shared Objects,
Silverlight's Local Storage and new techniques like browser fingerprinting
(<https://panopticlick.eff.org/>) there are much more effective ways for
advertisers to keep track of you. Bottom line, if you don't want to be
tracked/targeted by advertisers online you should be using tools like
BetterPrivacy or simply using the advertiser's opt-out functionality. Some
trackers like BlueKai (<http://tags.bluekai.com/registry>) actually offer a
great deal of transparency into what they're tracking about you and allow you
to control how that data is used.

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warwick
Other than cookies and local storage, none of those would be effective on iOS.
Flash and Silverlight are out, and given the lack of a plugin architecture and
no user installed fonts, fingerprinting wouldn't work past browser version.

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newman314
IMO mobile browsers are way behind in any sort of privacy options compared to
desktop browsers (and _they_ arent very good in general).

Hopefully, people will start realizing this and start clamoring for better
privacy which would be even more relevant given the geolocation implications.

Right now, I can see that Palm sends every app start/stop event along with a
whole slew of other events back to a Palm website and I'm sure Apple does the
same.

It would be interesting to measure how much battery life increases when
smartphones are not forced to report large amounts of usage information back
to the manufacturer.

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xonder
Well, in this case clearing the storage won't be enough as it seems like the
ad uses the device identifier to track you and restore the database right
after.

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bad_user
As far as I know, the device ID cannot be retrieved from code running in
Safari.

The point is pretty moot anyway, since native applications can and are using
the device ID to track you, and it is unique.

On my iPhone I have native apps installed for accessing ... Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn, Google Reader, Yahoo Messenger and Skype. I prefer native apps, even
for Facebook which has a kickass web page optimized for mobiles, and I'm sure
I'm not the only one.

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Sephr
DOM storage is cleared by default in the clear browser data menu in Firefox
and (likely) Chrome. This is trivial to fix by making the iOS 'clear cookies'
option also clear DOM storage, which I would assume Apple would eventually do.

