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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

Why do they keep saying that ANY websites can track you through your cookies.

They also seem to imply that google purposefully made the PREF cookie so the NSA can use it to track people. If anything, google is a victim themselves here.

I love Frontline, but come on, this is just not accurate. Unless a lot of the things I understand about the browser is wrong.

Whenever I see inaccuracies in tech reporting, it makes me wonder if there are similar inaccuracies in other fields that I do not recognize because it's not my specialty..

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If the NSA can track the request from your browser to the adsense/doubleclick servers, then they can track where you go around large parts of the Internet.

I didn't get the sense they were saying the NSA made Google make that cookie. Just that Google was denying that cookie was used for tracking, except 8 years ago when they said it was.

I suspect we don't fully understand the level of ability the NSA has to monitor a specific Internet user. It might be accurate to say that, if they want to track you, they will easily know every site you visit surfing around the web due to ad tracking cookies by all the various ad companies. I bet they can tie a Google PREF=ID to you by name and IP address.

Yes I understand that. And I agree the NSA is wrong for doing that. But I felt like the show is implying that google is purposefully doing it to allow the NSA to track you. When it seems to me that Google got outsmarted by the NSA.

I agree that Google was outsmarted by the NSA. I disagree the show was implying otherwise.

Actually the summary of that whole segment seemed to simply be that, 1. google is really good at tracking users 2. NSA became very interested in that fact. 3. NSA piggybacked on Google's tracking without them knowing.

I didn't get that they were saying google knew that the tracking cookie was being used in this way. Only that they were setting the example of how best to spy on people.

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