Bloggers and publishers of many stripes are celebrating a new plan by Getty Images to allow free use of its photography—as long as the proper embed code is used. In a post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website, Parker Higgins notes that many have reason to be excited, but privacy alarm bells are ringing: Getty, as a third-party host, “can possibly get and log your IP address and the exact time of the request” when you view that image on whichever website. Also, because Getty may be so popular, viewers will ping their servers often and from various sites, allowing for correlation of browsing history. Further, Getty has “certainly thought about” monetizing data usage.
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