Google Targets Apple Customers With Secret Safari Cookie

Google has been tracking users surfing the web with Apple's Safari browser.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Google has used a special type of cookie—a short text file stored on your computer that can be used to log into your favourite sites, but also to track your behaviour.  The new cookie behaves in a specific way, only tacking users running Safari, whether theat's on a Mac, an iPad or an iPhone.  

Jonathan Mayer, a researcher from Stanford discovered the technique, which should in theory be impossible given that Safari automatically blocks cookies coming from anywhere other than sites that the user has chosen to visit.

The search giant will have been able to collect all sorts of information without their users finding out.  After a call from the WSJ, Google has apparently turned off the system, and released a statement saying that the code was used 'to collect personal information' and that it should never worked with Safari.  But Google generates a lot of ad revenue through Safari, by sheer virtue of the number of iPhones there are on the market.

Apple has responded with a software update that should prevent make this sort of intervention impossible in the future.  Other ad services are said to have exploited the weakness in the browser to collet personal information themselves.

Whatever happened to 'don't be evil'?


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