I interrupt my usual flow of news about Vermont Yankee for a moment.Our daughter, Julia Angwin, headed a team of Wall Street Journal reporters that won a prestigious Loeb award two days ago.
According to the Poynter Institute blog, the Loeb awards are considered the most prestigious award in business journalism. The winning category was Online Enterprise.
The series that won, What They Know, is about how on-line consumers are tracked on the Internet. For example, Dictionary.com was installing 234 tracking files (including cookies, flash cookies and beacons) on your computer whenever you visited. Most of these files were from third party vendors planning to sell your data. (I say "was installing" because Dictionary.com may have changed their ways after the Wall Street Journal story appeared.)
Due to the What They Know series, privacy concerns are becoming more visible to Congress, and consumers can expect higher levels of personal privacy in the future. We are very proud of Julia.
