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Privacy & Data

Watch Out, Tech Companies. $22.5-Million Google Fine Shows FTC Flexing Muscle.

It was a fairly obscure privacy violation as privacy violations go. Google‘s engineers wanted certain aspects of Google+ to work on iDevices, but Apple had built privacy protections into its Safari browser that stymied them. The search giant’s engineers wanted the browser to recognize that a user was signed into Google, so that the smartphone surfers could +1 stuff, mainly ads. So the engineers came up with a trick to get around Safari’s block, as detailed by the Wall Street Journal, which outed the company after security researchers saw what was going on.