Privacy Gets a New Round of Prominence

A recent round of publicized privacy vulnerabilities on prominent websites has led technologists, regulators, and end users all to begin asking more detailed questions about how best to achieve privacy: What data leaves a user´s computer, what another party can observe about that user via that data, and then, vitally, what that party does with it? Several privacy advocates have cautioned that HTML 5 might enable advertisers and malware creators to embed more persistent tracking opportunities. The most publicized example thus far is Samy Kamkar´s Evercookie, which can burrow into at least 10 places on a computer, far more than usually found. It combines traditional tracking tools with new features that come with the new Web language.