San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/17/BUSO1N9ASP.DTL
Google and several other advertising companies are bypassing the privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, according to a report from a Stanford University researcher that set off a heated debate on Friday.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday night that the Mountain View search giant and others were “tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.” The story prompted an outcry from privacy advocates, and many tech and legal observers.
Chris Hoofnagle, a digital privacy expert at UC Berkeley’s law school, said there’s a corporate tone-deafness within the engineering-centric culture of Google that leads to these sorts of mistakes.
“To the engineer, cookie blocking appears to be a technical error that they should try to solve,” he said. “It’s very difficult for them to accept the frame that some people do not want this tracking.”