While it will take a long time for the full implications of the Viacom vs. Youtube battle to be known, one thing has already become clear – user privacy is an extremely low priority.
The great fear, of course, is that users are held responsible for having viewed copyrighted content, wittingly or unwittingly.
Yes, I said unwittingly!
You may or may not know this, but many modern applications prefetch links. They’re smart enough to know what link you’re likely to follow next, and they queue it up for you, in advance. This speeds up your browsing experience quite dramatically!
It affects your privacy too though, since the act of prefetching registers that you’ve loaded a particular page, even with no action on your behalf. From Mozilla:
“Privacy implications
Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed. (For example, if you google amazon, the google results page will prefetch www.amazon.com, causing amazon cookies to be sent back and forth.”
(http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ)
I know of at least two applications that prefetch links – Firefox and Stumbleupon. You can check your settings quite easily.
- Open a new browser window
- Type about:config in the address bar
- In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘prefetch’. You might see several settings.
Network.prefetch-next is Firefox’s setting for prefetching links; double-click this to toggle it from on to off, if you like.
If you want to adjust Stumbleupon’s settings for prefetching links, it is easiest to do this through the SU toolbar thusly:
Tools->Toolbar Options->Configuration->Prefetch Stumbles (makes stumbling faster)
So will I be changing my settings? Probably not. I don’t honestly believe that my youtube viewing habits will get me into trouble. However, knowledge is good; and you should know that the prefetching options that speed up your browsing comes with a cost to your privacy.
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