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Comment by eugeniub | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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