SCN: Web bugs

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

=========================


(John Schwartz, NY Times)---Many people who have personal Web 
pages are unknowingly tracking people who visit and sending the 
information to third parties, according to a new report.   

The report  -  which will be released today by Cyveillance, which 
tracks Internet sites for corporate clients  -  says that the use of an 
Internet monitoring technology popularly known as "Web bugs" has 
exploded on personal Web pages  -  especially those created free 
through online companies like America Online and Geocities, a 
company owned by Yahoo. The monitoring technology, which can be 
used to gather information on visitors to a Web site, is invisibly 
added to the Web pages as part of elements that the sites offer to 
help create the Web page.   

America Online, for example, encourages users to place an 
advertisement offering a free trial membership; the company 
promises to pay users $50 for any new America Online member who 
signs up for the service by clicking on the ad.   

When users place the AOL ad on their pages, they also get a Web 
bug that passes information along to Be Free Inc., an Internet market 
research and advertising company.   

The Web bug technology, which is also known by such terms as 
"clear gifs" and "Web beacons," now appears on 18 percent of 
personal pages, compared with less than 4 percent of pages over all 
and 16 percent of home pages for major companies. In a similar 
survey that Cyveillance conducted in 1998, fewer than 0.5 percent of 
personal Web pages contained Web bugs.   

"The increase was so large on personal pages we went back to 
check it, because we thought it must be a mistake," said Brian 
Murray, the author of the report.   

The privacy policy of Yahoo states that the company sometimes 
uses Web bugs, but does not say explicitly that it places them on 
personal pages of its users. The America Online privacy policy does 
not describe the use of Web bugs on personal pages.   

Often invisible, Web bugs are generally innocuous: they are often 
used, for example, to count visitors to sites or to gather statistical 
information about Web sites without collecting any personal 
information about those visitors.   

Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for America Online, said that its 
Web bugs collect no personally identifiable information on the 
visitors to personal pages, and had a single purpose: "to send 
checks to people" whose Web pages attract new customers to the 
company.   

But privacy advocates find the potential of such bugs alarming. 
Scott Charney, an Internet privacy and security expert at 
PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that he had seen an early draft of the 
Cyveillance survey, and that if Web bugs were in fact being used 
without consumers' knowledge to gather information, "it's extremely 
troubling  -  the technology should not be used to collect information 
in such a covert way."   

The use of bugs to track people and to create profiles of them 
becomes more powerful  -  and, some privacy advocates argue, 
more problematic  -  when the technology is used by a network of 
sites linked to some third party.   

The bugs are often placed on pages by third parties, like online 
advertising agencies, to collect data about visitors to pages of the 
agencies' clients and to help the advertising company to determine 
which banner ads the visitors should see.   

By sharing information among Web bugs across several different 
sites, the bug can also be used to track people's movements as 
they wander across the Internet. And if the visitor has given 
personal information to one site, say by registering for contests or 
signing a visitor's log, then the information can be linked to his or 
her activities on any other site with a Web bug issued by the same 
third party.   

Cyveillance, which is based in Arlington, Va., conducted the survey, 
which included a million Web pages, to determine how prevalent 
these bugs have become; since the company works with clients to 
safeguard their reputations in the online world, Cyveillance 
executives said, the survey was intended to warn companies about 
the growing controversy surrounding the bugs. The Cyveillance 
report did not identify companies that place Web bugs.   

The Web site for Be Free, the company that gets a great deal of the 
America Online traffic, says it "sits uniquely in the middle of a 
valuable data stream between businesses, their online marketing 
partners and consumers." The company is based in Marlborough, 
Mass.   

Tom Gerace, the company's co- founder, said the company did not 
collect any information that could be used to identify consumers 
personally. He said that he created Be Free with his brother in 1996 
to provide "flexible, robust marketing analysis so our customers 
and their affiliates can become better marketers over time."   

The monitoring technology, which he says he prefers to refer to as 
Web beacons, helps track billions of advertising promotions each 
month for companies like America Online, Microsoft, and 
Barnesandnoble.com.   


Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company






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