Google on its heels after Safari privacy breach

Google has been scrambling to give Internet users more power to block advertisers from tracking their online behaviour, as it seeks to limit the damage from the latest privacy scandal to dent its corporate image.
As part of the effort, it will adhere to “do not track” requests from individuals when serving up adverts from its own DoubleClick network, according to a person familiar with the plans, a move that would make it the first big online advertising company to limit itself voluntarily in this way.
Google’s race to regain the high ground came after its latest admission to a devastating privacy glitch.
The slip-up was uncovered by a researcher at Stanford University, who discovered that the company had secretly overridden a block in Apple’s Safari browser that was meant to bar illicit tracking by advertisers.
Google had circumvented the default setting in Safari that is meant to prevent advertisers from planting “cookies” in the browser, according to Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at the university. Cookies are short pieces of code that gather information about the websites users visit and report the information back to the companies that planted them.
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