In 2014, you can’t even get your official White House lies straight from the tap without being surveilled.
Peter Eckersley and Kurt Opsahl, Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Yesterday, ProPublica reported on new research by a team at KU Leuven and Princeton on canvas fingerprinting. One of the most intrusive users of the technology is a company called AddThis, who by are employing it in “shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.” Canvas fingerprinting allows sites to get even more identifying information than we had previously warned about with our Panopticlick fingerprinting experiment…
While YouPorn quickly removed AddThis after the report was published, the White House website still contains AddThis code.
Let that sink in for a moment: A bunch of pornographers are behaving more ethically than the Obama White House.
…The canvas fingerprint can’t be blocked by cookie management techniques, or erased with your other cookies. This is inconsistent with the White House’s promise that “Visitors can control aspects of website measurement and customization technologies used on WhiteHouse.gov.”
Promise? A promise is just a way to get people to stop criticizing you. Once they stop paying attention, you can do whatever you want. That’s King Barry’s way.
Is this due to the White House’s arrogant disdain for us, or their lazy incompetence? I see no reason it can’t be both.
(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)