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Comment by ashishgandhi | Hacker News Reader

Lately I've been reading quite a few articles that arguably show Google not following the "Don't Be Evil" moto. But I've always found people having an explanation for the behavior where the benefit of the doubt can be given to Google. (E.g. Social results from SPYW, etc.)

I wonder if anyone can throw some light on this matter if there's a way they could be doing this "by mistake", or "unintentionally" or something else. For example could the +1 button be a cause? I don't know but I'm curious.

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It's a lot more nuanced than the WSJ article made it seem. Google and other web advertisers engaged in what most would consider normal activity, but that Apple had specifically disabled in Mobile Safari. Here's a good explanation from John Battelle: http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/02/a-sad-state-of-int...

Oh please, you know who else does not ask me about my choice regarding third party cookies?

Every other major browser vendor.

Just because everybody is making money selling user information and attention to the advertisers does not negate the fact that Apple's choice is sitting on the safer side for user privacy. And you know what's also common practice? Scrap user's address book and beam it up the cloud.

Apple is at fault in both cases for failing to safeguard users from the abusers.

Path and Google are the abusers.

And I think there might be a non subtle, non nuanced difference here.

The Battelle link is a horrible explanation. His position is that user tracking for ads is a normal function of the web people want and therefore it is Apple's fault for blocking it by default. Unreal.

Given the nature of the bug that was exploited, it's pretty unlikely this could have been done by accident. It would have to be deliberate.

The bug, to be specific, is to submit a form using POST in an iframe; the POST response is then able to set cookies. In this case they did the POST in a hidden iframe with no data.

Lately I've seen some people go whole hog on Google products. Usually they justify it by saying, "well Google's products are really good and I don't want to have to pay for email so it's okay if they read my email/track my browsing/target me with adds". It's just mind boggling how the Overton window on privacy gets more permissive.

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