Whipped Cream Difficulties

…four advertising companies — Google, Vibrant Media, WPP PLC’s Media Innovation Group and Gannett’s PointRoll — have all been using code to work around privacy features in Safari’s iPhone browser. The search engine giant intended to place a temporary cookie on users’ devices to see if they were logged-in to Google services, but the research found that other cookies were also being placed on devices through the workaround.

Google is removing the cookies. Here’s a direct link to the actual work by Jonathan Mayer. And here’s the WSJ report, which does not appear to be behind a paywall.

Edited to add: LAT:

In the wake of evidence that Google Inc. circumvented privacy protections on the iPhone, federal lawmakers are asking if the company violated the terms of its broad privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Apple, Clippings, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.