Web Bugs and Government Sites

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Web Bugs and Government Sites

By Martin English | January 1, 2006

The government cookie story is getting stupider by the day. The AP ??” having naively believed they had some investigative scoop when they discovered that the NSA site, like most every site on earth, sets cookies ??” now finds that the White House has “bugs”: gifs that let stats software count visitors (like the garish, multicolored thing on the very bottom right of this page). All it does is measure traffic. It is an issue only with the tin-hat society. This is a nonstory born of ignorance and paranoia and now hype.

The problem is that a web bug does more than only counts the number of visitors anonymously and doesn’t record personal information. Web bugs can, and are, used to track users who, whether they know it or not, are no more anonymous than their IP addresses, which are totally knowable.

And if you are truly paranoid? Think about that the next time you visit a porn site (mmm…? can you spell spam ??). Or a site considered a threat to Homeland Security. Thething is that this is old news, that ‘net savvy people should already be aware of. Here’s a Web bug FAQ from the EFF, written back in 1999. That’s also when a certain “Richard M. Smith” first started writing about the topic.

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