Marketscore, created by the
market research company comScore Networks, Inc. In return
for a modest payment for participation, users joined the
‘Marketscore Panel’ and installed the Marketscore
application. Amongst other features, Marketscore
incorporated what is effectively a man-in-the-middle SSL
proxy which aimed to crack open and to monitor all your
secure on-line transactions, sending data about everything you
bought, and how much you paid for it, back to comScore.
Q. Surely a legitimate application wouldn’t go quite that far?
A. ComScore is no longer distributing Marketscore, perhaps
due to the publicity it received when some American
universities decided to block it outright, despite the strongly
held tradition of academic freedom on their networks [15].
But here is what comScore themselves [16] have published
about its behaviour:
‘…[C]omScore has recruited for the Marketscore Panel over
one and a half million opt-in members who have agreed to
have their Internet behavio[u]r confidentially monitored
and captured on a totally anonymous basis. These members
give comScore explicit, opt-in permission to confidentially
monitor their online activities in return for valuable benefits
[…].
Those individuals who choose to be part of the Marketscore
Panel […] download comScore’s technology to their
browser where it unobtrusively routes the member’s
Internet connection through comScore’s network of
servers […]. The technology allows comScore to capture
the complete detail of all the communication to and from
each individual’s
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