Cookies that cannot be killed
Your Facebook data might be getting sent all over the place, at least according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigative piece that’s received a lot of attention.
But Facebook or no, let’s make no mistake: you are being tracked whenever you go online. The most common way is the cookie, a little bit of code placed on your computer by sites you visit so they can recognize you when you come back. The cookie has been used since the beginning of the boom of the Internet. It’s a little obnoxious having it placed on your computer without your knowledge or permission, but it’s always been fairly harmless. You give up a sliver of privacy in the name of convenience. You make that bargain all the time online.
Used to be that if you wanted to delete these cookies, it was easy. But new strains of cookie are impossible to shake. Glenn Fleishman joins us to talk about a new cookie that is impossible to kill. It was created, and its source code shared, to draw attention to how these unkillable cookies work. We also talk to Samy Kamkar, the programmer behind evercookie.
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