Washington Post: “NSA Uses Google Cookies to Pinpoint Targets for Hacking”

From The Washington Post:

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using “cookies” and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency’s internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.
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Privacy advocates have pushed to create a “Do Not Track” system allowing consumers to opt out of such tracking. But Jonathan Mayer of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, who has been active in that push, says “Do Not Track efforts are stalled out.” They ground to a halt when the Digital Advertising Alliance, a trade group representing online ad companies, abandoned the effort in September after clashes over the proposed policy. One of the primary issues of contention was whether consumers would be able to opt out of all tracking, or just not be served advertisements based on tracking.

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Note: There are a number of tools and techniques that can used to automatically and frequently delete cookies as well as turn off trackers, ad beacons, etc.  No tool is perfect. That said, here are a few tools you might want to look at. All are free. 

• Ghostery
• Disconnect.me
• AdBlock Plus 
• Vanilla Cookies Manager (for Chrome)

Filed under: Data Files, News