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Disney, others hit with website tracking lawsuit
Tue, 17 Aug 2010
If you’ve been to Disney.com recently, has the company been tracking your visits to other websites, too?
That’s what a federal lawsuit has suggested, saying that Disney — as well as Warner Bros. Records, Ustream, Demand Media and others — knowingly used widget-advertising company Clearspring Technologies to illegally track website users.
The lawsuit was filed a week ago in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and was brought by a group of minors and their parents. According to a Cnet report, the plaintiffs contend that Disney and other companies using Clearspring knew that the company was tracking users as they went to other websites, and the information gleaned from that tracking had the potential of exposing a lot of information about the users, such as web-viewing habits, race, gender, financial information, family relationships and health information.
Information collected from those users also could have been sold to third parties, according to reports about the lawsuit.
Clearspring, according to reports, was able to track computer users by installing Flash cookies on users’ machines without their knowledge. Investigations have shown that Flash-technology cookies aren’t necessarily deleted when computer users remove traditional cookies from their browsers. Also, while typical web cookies can contain 4 kbs of information, reports have shown that Flash-based cookies can contain up to 100 kbs of info. Adobe’s Flash cookies also can be installed on both PCs and Macs and in a variety of web browsers.
Disney has not responded to the suit, and the plaintiffs have asked for unspecified damages. A similar complaint was filed against one of Clearspring’s competitors in July.
Steven Ford, Orlando Sentinel
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