So the people at the Mozilla Foundation, who produce the Firefox browser (the web's best and most open browser), screamed in frustration and developed their own, more stringent, standards. They built an add-on, called "Collusion", that tracks who is tracking you. We've yet to see how that will play out -- the add-on is still in experimental stage.
But even if Firefox's Collusion helps us, one problem remains: people are forced to make a product decision in order to protect constitutionally-supported privacy. There's always a way to turn these things off but most people don't know it and most don't know they're being tracked. Is the right to privacy a commodity? Can violations of privacy hide behind a "buyer beware" warning?
What's more, shouldn't there be some governance over what companies can do with that data?
Both tracking and the Manning decision are, in their own way, a radical challenge to what the Internet is and should continue to be. They are fundamentally linked. If you have the right to get any information you want and post any information you think should be posted, you have the right to do so privately without governments and companies knowing who you are and how to get to you. If we lose the latter right, we will find ourselves coldly restricted in exercising the former right because the truth is always a threat to those who seek to control it.
These days, those in power fit that category perfectly.
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