WWW creator speaks against usage tracking
By Tim Conneally, BetaNews
March 18, 2008, 10:04 AM
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World-Wide Web (the concept of hypertext documents being readable through a browser) recently spoke to the BBC voicing his opposition to ISPs tracking user habits.
Berners-Lee thinks each user's browser history is property of the user, and if a company wants to use that information in the creation of, for example, customized advertisements, that needs to be negotiated with the user directly. The user needs to understand how others can benefit from his information.
A growing source of misinformation, he said, are blogs. "You're taking suggestions of what you read from people who you've probably never met, but whom you trust."
Though Sir Tim is infinitely quotable on Web-related subjects, his insight into the transparency of the everyday user's browsing should hit particularly close to home for many.
In England, controversy has arisen over major ISP's potential adoption of a service called Phorm, which creates user-customized ads based upon their browsing history. This technique was the same that raised the ire of advocacy groups when the DoubleClick-Google merger was in its initial stages.
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