From The Washington Post:
The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with "cookies" and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.
A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a "compelling need."
Read more ....
My Comment: In my professional background (I have to pay my bills), I have been involved in the computer industry since the early 1980s. My background is very extensive and .... if I may be a bit modest .... nothing can pass and/or surprise me. If I cannot solve a problem, I know people who can.
After 9/11 I had a problem with one of my drives .... a nasty virus that I could not eliminate. I formatted the drive and then did a check. I found that there was something in the boot sector of my hard drive. Thinking it was the virus that messed up my hard drive, I then went through the motions of using my software to eliminate this problem.
Nothing worked. I even did a slow format using a motherboard that was designed to do these things .... it still did not worked.
I did not want to throw aside the hard drive, so I went to a friend who (because of his work with the Canadian government) had all the software and equipment to eliminate such headaches.
It was with him that I discovered that this anomaly had a whitehouse.gov address.
This incredibly sophisticated cookie (for a lack of a better term) was not the reason why my drive got infected .... the infection in fact helped me to notice it. Wondering how it got there, I then recalled that a month before I had visited the White House web site to read and browse its contents. I guess it planted this calling card then.
I knew at that time that the U.S. Government was prohibited from tracking its own citizens and their use of U.S. government web sites. But I am a Canadian citizen who lives in Canada .... thereby making me "out of U.S. jurisdiction" and a target for U.S tracking.
So .... has the U.S. been tracking what citizens from other countries have been doing when they visit American Government web sites .... from my own personal experience, I will have to say yes.
Have American's who live abroad also been swept into this web of tracking what people do ..... I will have to also say yes.
Is this legal .... hmmmmm .....