Fearing What You Don’t Understand
Saturday, December 31st, 2005Before I get into the meat of this post, lemme just quote this analogous story that I’ve always found amusing.
Alan McHughen, who works in the field of genetically modified plants, decided that enough was enough. He doesn’t like what he’s seeing and wants people to be able to make informed decisions.
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How bad is the public’s misunderstanding of this field? McHughen cites recent surveys in Great Britain showing that only 40% of respondents correctly said that ordinary tomatoes contain genes. The rest either didn’t know, or thought that the average tomato somehow did without the genetic material that is present in every living thing. Similarly, he relates a story of how an activist in Belgium got into an argument at a summit about genetically modified plants, and stormed out yelling, “You’ll never convince me to eat DNA!”
And this angry fool is what I’ve been thinking of as I’ve seen this ridiculous uproar about the NSA’s website using cookies. To call this a tempest in a teapot would be an exaggeration. In light of the very serious issue of domestic spying by the NSA, getting worked up about this is the equivalent of berating Charles Manson for jaywalking.
As the FAQ at CookieCentral makes clear, for all practical purposes, the NSA can’t spy on you using cookies.
2.4 Are Cookies Dangerous to My Computer?NO. A cookie is a simple piece of text. It is not a program, or a plug-in. It cannot be used as a virus, and it cannot access your hard drive. Your browser (not a programmer) can save cookie values to your hard disk if it needs to, but that is the limit of the effect on your system.
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2.6 Are Cookies a Threat to My Privacy?The sad truth is that revealing any kind of personal information opens the door for that information to be spread.
Consider the growing trend of technology conveniences in our lives. We use “frequent buyer” cards at supermarkets and gas stations. We place electronic tags on our cars to pay tolls faster and easier. We let banks pay our bills for us automatically each month without checks.
While each of these technologies (and others like them) have made our lives more convenient, each time we use them exposes us to a loss of privacy. Stores know what foods you eat. Gas stations know how much you spend on gas per fill-up. Turnpike operators know how fast you drive on their highways. Banks know how you spend your money each month.
It’s the same with cookies. In fact, one may argue that cookies in the long-run will be less damaging to privacy efforts than those technologies described above. If you’re going to single-out cookies as your sole vulnerability to personal privacy, you should re-examine how you live your daily life.
More importantly, the NSA website (or any website for that matter) can only view the cookies that come from their domain. In other words, they can’t use cookies to track how often you login to Ebay, check your email, or read a liberal blog.
And if that’s enough to freak you out, then you should just stop going on the WWW altogether. Just from the HTTP logs for this site, I can tell what time a user accessed a page, what site referred them, which pages within my site are being accessed, and the operating system, timezone, browser, and internet service provider. But anything beyond that which you might consider “personal information” (ie. names, passwords, credit card numbers) can only end up in a cookie if you give them that information in the first place.
So, yes, the NSA (like every other website) can use cookies to track when visitors access their site and record that information for later use, but they don’t know who you are unless either (a) you fill out a form on the site that provides them with personal information or (b) they tap into their massive database of information gathered by illegally tapping internet hubs. Either way, stop wasting your time freaking out about cookies guys. It’s really not a big deal compared to everything else they’ve been doing.




