7. Advertising and Embedded Content

[My web history is] mine—you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.[1]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Publishing information is the backbone of web content, and bloggers and webmasters frequently rely on embedded content from companies such as Google to enhance the quality of their sites. Unfortunately, embedding third-party content is the equivalent of planting a web bug in web pages,[2] alerting the source of the embedded content to a user’s presence on a given site and facilitating logging, profiling, and fingerprinting. More important, the source of the third-party content can aggregate these single ...

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