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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

A good step forward. Does the NY Times itself track what its users read? Does it provide that information to others?

If so, this change amounts to not protecting user privacy as much as insisting that only the NYT can monetize their users' privacy.

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Random coffee shop / hotel / etc wifi owners and other users on the network will only know that you're reading nytimes.com, and not which particular section/article.

And your session cookie..

Session cookies are transmitted as headers which are protected by HTTPS.

Sorry, I meant that as an additional reply to

"If so, this change amounts to not protecting user privacy as much as insisting that only the NYT can monetize their users' privacy."

The cookie is now hidden from the MITM. Before, not only could they see what pages you see, but they could login as you.

Yes, that's assumed in what I meant. Vendors that track their users, such as Google and maybe the NYT, by implementing HTTPS are basically saying: We don't want to share that data with anyone else (e.g., 'random coffee shop / hotel / etc wifi owners'); we want to keep the monetization of our users' privacy to ourselves.

It's actually very easy to figure out which article you're reading. I just did a little experiment for fun: https://github.com/ndbroadbent/nyt_privacy

The wifi owners can see that you're reading nytimes.com, but they can also see how much data was transmitted. All they need to do is look up the length of each article, and compare that with how much data the server returned.

Of course, I'm not too worried about hotel owners. I can imagine this technique is already being used by a lot of governments around the world.

I don't see how anyone can monetize user privacy without NYT's permission, with or without HTTPS. All of the monetization methods, ad trackers on NYT pages, browser fingerprinting, malware on your computer, etc works with or without HTTPS.

Without HTTPS, whoever owns the LAN you use, its ISP, and various intermediary networks can easily track everything that appears in your web browser by reading the same traffic your browser reads.

This is more than a hypothetical concern, too: back in 2011 a number of ISPs came under fire for hijaacking certain search keywords[1], Comcast has injected ads into hotspot traffic[2], and Andreas Gal has alleged that smaller search engines were buying aggregate Google search result data from ISPs trying to improve their result quality[3].

All of that is impossible with HTTPS.

1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/widespread-search-hija...

2. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-java...

3. https://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-se...

Thanks. And even those issues underplay the magnitude of the problem. Look up Deep Packet Inspection, for example. It doesn't take much to read and record the content, and nothing stops them from doing it in the U.S. (AFAIK).

Your mention of how it was 'impossible with HTTPS' to inject ads into web traffic made me recall how, two years ago, Lenovo shipped laptops with software ('Superfish') that injected ads into encrypted webpages:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/19/superfish_lenovo_spy...

Lenovo got approximately $250,000 for installing the malware:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/27/lenovo...

Verizon and AT&T (or maybe t-mobile) inject unique headers into http requests over their mobile networks.

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