US Government Web tracking under scrutiny
Published: 05 Jan 2006 15:05 GMT
Dozens of federal agencies are tracking visits to US government Web sites in violation of long-standing rules designed to protect online privacy, an investigation by ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com has shown.
From the Air Force to the Treasury Department, government agencies are using either "Web bugs" or permanent cookies to monitor their visitors' behaviour, even though federal law restricts the practice.
Some departments changed their practices this week after being contacted by CNET News.com. The Pentagon said it wasn't aware that its popular Defenselink.mil portal tracked visitors — in violation of a privacy notice — and said it would fix the problem. So did the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
"We were not aware of the cookies set to expire in 2016," a Pentagon representative said Wednesday. "All of the cookies we had set with WebTrends were to be strictly (temporary) cookies, and we are taking immediate action." WebTrends is a commercial Web-monitoring service.
The practice of tracking Web visitors came under fire last week when the National Security Agency was found to use permanent cookies to monitor visitors, a practice it halted after inquiries from the Associated Press. The White House also was criticised last week for employing WebTrends' tracking mechanism that used a tiny GIF image.
A 2003 government directive says that, in general, "agencies are prohibited from using" Web bugs or cookies to track Web visitors. Both techniques are ways to identify repeat visitors and, depending on the configuration, can be used to track browsing behaviour across non-government Web sites too.
"It's evidence that privacy is not being taken seriously," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University, referring to the dozens of agencies tracking visitors. "The guidance is very clear." While working in the Clinton administration in 2000, Swire helped to craft an earlier Web tracking policy.
To detect which agencies engage in electronic tracking, CNET News.com wrote a computer program that connected to every agency listed in the official US Government Manual, and then evaluated what monitoring techniques were used. The expiration dates of the cookies detected ranged from 2006 to 2038, with most of them marked as valid for at least a decade or two.
Many agencies appeared to have no inkling that their Web sites were configured to record the activities of users. "When the agency...
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