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Amazon Search Bar Will Track Your Browsing
Limit writes "There has been a lot of discussion regarding GMail and Google's privacy policies. However, with the recent debut of Amazon's A9.com, I havn't seen any mention to the information they intend to collect. I saw this article today, "The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way ... If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well." Where is all the media hype about this privacy issue?"
If they see me browsing freshmeat.net, and sourceforge all the time will they send me free stuff?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
Is anyone reminded of asinine when reading A9? I think that we should officially coin the term and use it until asinine changes their name.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Google is just a company started by a few geeks that made it big because they give an excellent service and that's it. Amazon is infested by the long tentacles of certain corporations and that's what matters to their business.
Guess which one is going to be slammed by the "traditional media" time and again.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Seems to me that installing any third party browser add-on is only asking for trouble.
Why add another executable that will sap some your system resources while at the same time be able to monitor your surfing habits?
Doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
It's a Feature, not a Bug. Seriously though - that is partly what the search bar is for - to let you keep your search history.
The web-search (a9.com) when you are logged in does the same.
Anyone who signs up for a "free" service without reading the small print deserves what they get, just like with any other 'unbelievably-good' offer...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I always want my browser to cache my Google search strings like it caches my web URLs - searching Google from my URL address field is the best Web improvement since Flash. And I want that typeahead history recall option in the address field in *all* my browsers: work, home, phone, friend's computer. So I want a server, but I want *my* server. I don't want Amazon storing it, and not just for privacy: I want all my searches, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, PriceWatch, to show up in the same address field. These competitors can't do that. But a third party can. And a third party can offer encrypted storage and transmission of my search metadata, so they can legitimately promise not to comb my personal search terms, selling me out to targetted advertisers and busybodies.
--
make install -not war
Personally, if an application can use my search records to provide me with more information I'm actually interested in, I'd welcome the oppurtunity. If anyone is concerned with privacy, they don't need to install it! I'm still waiting for the time to come when I don't have to watch tampon commercials on my television!
People are going crazy over this stuff, but they forget the fact that these services are not required. If you're paranoid and concerned that Google and Amazon are going to sell you down the river, don't use it! It's that simple.
Where's the outrage against Microsoft for allowing all of this seething spyware to install itself so easily? Likewise, where's the bad press about companies that are hawking this garbage and actively selling your information without permission? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to clean out this sludge from. Thank G-d for Mozilla!
www.lonseidman.com
The Google Toolbar does this also. I don't know about A9's, but Google's asks you when you install it if you want the advanced features, which require it to communicate back to Google.
There was a discussion on this topic a day or two ago. Take a look at this /. forum when you get a chance. Good stuff really. Many ramblings about the possible fallout of this type of info accumulation.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
People really need to get over these privacy concerns and actually look at real issues (DMCA, MPAA / RIAA). The media latches onto these issues because google and amazon are big names; the reality of logging is that every server does it!
Slashdot is logging us right now - via apache. We're logged / monitored throughout life, and there is ultimatly little we can do about it. Better to move onto more important issues.
Don't use it.
h at Choices and Access Do I Have?
Want to use it?
The full quote:
"The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way. Whenever you come to the site, we can show you what you searched for in the past in a very easy-to-organize fashion. If you want to hide some of that, you can opt out at any time. If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well. And we are working on many different ways to improve that."
You can opt-out.
Still demand your Constiutional Right to this private service?
From: http://www.a9.com/-/company/privacypolicy.jsp
"W
If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.A9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you."
Still not enough for you?
May I suggest: http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I installed a9 when it debuted last week. For me, the privacy-utility trade off has fallen on the useful side. A9 doesnt do anything that you couldnt do if you
a. searched google
b. searched Amazon's Inside the Book
c. kept a running blog to document your thoughts on all the pages you visit
used your history bar in your browser
Bringing all this functionality together in one app adds value to me.
This has worked for me in the trial phase... will have to rethink the long-term privacy implications in a couple weeks.
TripInvite.com: Group Travel Made Simple Evit
See http://toolbar.google.com/privacy.html
You can turn it of by disabling the advanced features. It's part of what makes pagerank work.
This "invasion of privacy" is not really an involuntary invasion. You have to know the risks of installing such software on your machine. If you voluntarily let someone into your home, are they invading your privacy by keeping track (in any fashion) of what you happen to be doing? I say no, because by allowing them in and not having unbreakable rules then you are allowing them to at very least keep track of what they see. This all goes back to advertising and squeezing every last penny out of it. The media makes pretty much all of their money with advertising, so of course they will not investigate their own questionable procedures lest they incriminate themselves in their own publications. Just because the spyware is coming from Amazon doesn't mean that it's newsworthy. I hate it just as much as everyone else here does, but you have to understand that if they think they can make money off of it, they'll do it. Companies like Amazon couldn't care less about having every customer being happy. As long as the money keeps pouring in they'll think they're doing everything right.
I am feeling fat and sassy
...and that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just Privacy. And this paddle game, privacy and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. My privacy, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. My privacy, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. My privacy, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. My privacy, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.
And while I'm quoting from the Jerk, my all time favorite...
I don't care about losing all the money. It's losing all the stuff.
Compliments of IMDB
Corporation are not evil per se. They exist to make money for their shareholders. They believe monitoring web browsing habits of people (who are voluntarily doing so) can better help them service their customers (only the means, not the ends) and make more money. They are doing the right thing from their perspective. They are not a totalitarian regime forcing this on everyone. Same with credit cards. If you don't want people to know what you are purchasing, use cash.
The only bad thing about all of this tyranny of convenience is that in the future, there will be no choices, because the convenient choices come to dominate. Imagine if in the future, we can no longer pay by cash because everyone has bought into convenient cashlessness. That, is the true danger.
Every commercial enterprise targets. Targetting is about making money and making money is about targetting.
... on and on ...
1) Malls: Malls collect information about the foot traffic, demographics and patterns of their customers. They can then position their rents according to the traffic.
2) Retail: They use loyalty cards, store credit cards and your regular credit cards to track and profile you. They know certain products sell better a week before paychecks are due and certain products sell better the week after paychecks are cashed.
3) CRM companies: Companies like Siebel / Onyx etc have extensive profiling options built into the software which are used my major corporations, govt groups and yes, when a sales guy finds out his customers birthday, wife's name and kid's school, he puts them in there are they're tracked.
4) Banks: You think for a second that they don't exploit young working people who don't have enough saved up and sell them expensive credit cards?
The list goes on
By the way, no one is brought up why my ISM using SpamAssassin is exempt from this whole invasion of privacy thingy... they have processes which reads my mail and makes certain decisions based on the content.
It's not like if it was cleverly cloaked. They're pretty open about it - you're trading in some privacy for some convenience. I mean, not everyone browses porn of embarassing kinds they wouldn't like other people to see.
If it's useful enough, I could see myself thinking of installing it at the Win32 box I use at work. I mostly just look at slashdot and my webmail (hosted at my home Linux computer) anyway.
I mean, gee, there's always a trade-off between convenience and privacy. Not everyone's encrypting all their outbound email with a note on how to install PGP.
The later incarnations of Mozilla (Firefox) have done some nice things with their search function, both for the history and browsing in general. Why would anyone want to entertain the notion of using beacon software like the Amazon toolbar? Of course, I don't buy anything from Amazon, so maybe that's another reason this isn't a big issue for me. So far, my favorite online book vendor is nerdbooks.com- nice people, great service, and NO SPYING.
Yes, there are some nasty privacy issues, so one needs to pick the partner carefully (as if your ISP doesn't know your browsing history). What is interesting is that services like A9 and GMail create a new level of personalization in which the massive technological scope of an Amazon or Google is put to work for individuals.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I was so upset about reading that Amazon was tracking my searches that I checked all my other programs for similar privacy violations. What I found may shock and appall some of you.
It must have been that last service pack I downloaded or that damn Auto Update, but you'll never believe it. INTERNET EXPLORER TRACKS YOUR BROWSING! Not only does it track every link you click on it also saves every image or web page you view. I found a hidden cache of html, images, flash files, audio files... everything I've looked at for weeks was there!
There was even a whole folder full of thousands of cookies! Websites sometimes use them I'm told, but that damn microsoft has been stealing them from websites I browse and backing them up in a secret folder on my hard drive. I deleted them and now all my web site preferences are gone and some of the sites I use don't log me in automatically anymore. Microsoft must have detected that I deleted them and they are demonstrating their power over me.
Well that's it I've had it I'm not going to take it any more! I'm switching to Mozilla today. Take that Microsoft.
P.S. Wal-Mart is switching everything to RFID tags, but that's where I get my tinfoil from. Does anyone have a good source of 1990s era tin foil? I've been using my baked potato tin foil to kill the RFID tags, but it doesn't always stick right and the wife refuses to wear her tinfoil hat at all now. I'm not sure if she can be trusted any longer...
Slashdot, while significant among the technorati, is a small eddy in a big pool. GMail is getting main stream hype - a senator in California is threatening legislation to prevent Google from rolling out the service. A few comments on Slashdot are not in the same league.
/. just a couple of stories ago. The concern with A9 seems, at least at this juncture, to be quite legitimate.
The concern with GMail seems to be overblown as was indicated here on
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
The reason you see so much outrage against voluntary services is that the web is a mass medium. When you have hundreds of thousands of unaware average consumers sign up for a compromising service, it's an approval for the company to require the service for ALL users in the future. It's the same with phone/cable/net bundles. Once you get a critical mass of people on board, companies can force the rest to adopt the same by either cancelling old services, or simply requiring all people to meet the new "standard". Unfortunately, your vote (your dollar) doesn't have meaningful sway in such a liquid environment. The wave of the masses can overrun your choice pretty easily because the only regulator is the market. Voluntary services used to be arbitrated quite well by individual choice, but the speed and ease of signing up, especially by accepting restrictions by default, makes the web an easy place for monopolistic companies to force their standards by stealth.
I find it to be extremely disturbing that people (especially slashdotters, apparently) are willing to give tracking information with such little reservation. It's gotten to the point where people say "well, i'd like amazon to know what i search, so they can give me better content."
Perhaps I'm just one in the paranoid crowd, but it seems to me that it's a bad idea to have everything "personalized". I don't want to have advertisements directed at my predicted statistical response to them. I find it particularly intrusive to try and predict what I'm most likely to buy, then flood me with advertisements crafted for my demographic. I'd like to keep the companies *outside* of my head.
And of course, everyone says "well, it's just a service, you don't have to use it", but if these kind of things are seen as acceptable, at some point it will become so universal that even if you don't want to be tracked and 'targetted', you won't have a choice. What happens if in a few years, to make any purchase online, I have to agree to having every site I vist tracked? Is it *really* that unrealistic? Would most people really object? I think the answer is beginning to change.
As the old adage goes, everyone can find out what you're doing online, they just don't have any meaningful (or easy) way of linking that information to your identity.
What's happening here is that now Amazon can do just that. They already have all the details they'll ever need about you, such as name, address and credit card number(s), they just added a way to correlate all your book searches to that identity, and now apparently all your browsing history too. Is this really that valuable to the common person? Do WE need to know every book we've ever browsed or every page we've ever visited? Marketing types will no doubt love this, but seriously, how will all this information ever work for you more than to whoever is hosting it?
The simple answer: ordinary people don't care that much. And they won't generate bad PR.
For instance, ordinary people have trouble finding the options to set the home page of MSIE to their liking. Everything seems too complex. Web pages are cluttered with tons of information normal people don't need. (By the way, the Google home page is a good example of design which is easy to grasp for anyone)
Ordinary people are just glad to get away with shopping in Amazon as easy as possible. If Amazon is going to track their behaviour and show them advertisements, there's a good chance they don't care, for example:
This is not to say ordinary people are stupid or anything. Most people don't have time to delve deeply into anything other than what they have to do daily at work or as a hobby. So, all this "online and computer thing" becomes a murky place they don't quite understand. Let alone the intricacies of what the web shop is going to do with the tracking information it gets from you.
Ignorance is bliss, but if you take away that ignorance, if you educate the ordinary people, they will know better. You could try to educate some computer-illiterate persons you know.
For example, you can play with the idea of Google (or any super-popular search engine) storing "everything" it indexes as well as all search strings. Playing along with some other big web companies, it's possible to pinpoint your traces inside Google. Then suppose an anti-bovine military regime takes over the USA. If the Google searches you've done have been "cowherding", "love for cows", "zen of moo" etc. there would be a good chance you'd get a visit from the Homeland Secret Police or such and get thrown to a concentration camp for anti-governmental behaviour (or just thrown there, it's not like they'd need a reason). Try telling something like that to your grandparents or parents, or aunt, or whoever is not well versed with computers. Will they consider it science fiction? Probably, and rightly so. But it's a distantly plausible scenario, nevertheless. A small amount of paranoia is healthy, if only to be aware of the possibilities.
I'm sure you can find other far-fetched examples yourself. For the ordinary person, however, this kind of example is something they cannot imagine themselves. Since they cannot imagine it, they cannot see it as a threat (or a possibility or a good thing). They have to rely on the advice of others.
And remember, you can kill with a hammer or you can build a house. It's the same with any technology. It's not good or evil by itself, but its use defines where it'll land in that rating.
I do not moderate.
It's not privacy people are yelling about; it's the PERCEPTION of privacy. Lots of folks have known all along that these little spies have been getting installed on people's computers. Some of them have actually done something about it; they install and run software like Spybot Search and Destroy. A few will even switch to an alternate browser like Mozilla to help keep spyware off their machines. But largely they don't care unless it jumps up and bites them on the backside. GMail was planning to do just that, by targeting ads based on message content. Never mind the information would never be audited by a human, it's just the reminder that it's not private that's rankling.
"Symbolism over substance", as Rush Limbaugh pointed out; to most people, it doesn't matter if they have privacy so long as they can pretend they have it. Just like they can vote for people who lie their asses off (and I'm not even going to draw a distinction between either Republicrat party), just so long as they can PRETEND they're electing people who have their best interests at heart.
Not you swordboy, but everybody.
If you install a plugin into your browser, it is tracking where you go and what you do, sending that data back to some server somewhere for processing.
Not just Amazon. You can pretty much be sure if you have any browser bar plug-in where you type stuff and it does stuff - you are being tracked. If the one you have isn't doing it yet, the programmers are adding it for the next release.
That is all, carry on.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I'm using a kazoo to make "modem noises" on my telephone line, and have trained myself to read Slashdot from the analog data that comes back.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Opera Has a search bar built in that you just drag down to select where your searching. It defaults to google, but theres AllTheWeb, super search, Amazon, news Search, TechTracker Search, and half a dozen others, wish there was IMDB search too, but anywho... This seems to be the functionality of both the Google and Amazon toolbars without tracking
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
For every company that makes the news for eroding our privacy, I am sure that there are dozens if not hundreds of examples that fly under the radar. The economic incentive for companies to gather more information about us is unrelenting while the public's interest will wax and wane. Companies know this - if they are willing to be patient and quietly sit out the initial media storm, then they can eventually do what they want (ie Microsoft and Palladium). Unfortunately, there are too many companies to use media attention to rescue us and I therefore predict that the loss of our privacy will continue unabated unless some tough legislation is passed.
When you install the Google toolbar in IE. It asks you if you want to turn on the PageRank feature which sends information back to google.
I suppose the difference is that google is probably not keeping track of an individual users browsing habits vs just browsing habits, whereas amazon will keep track of your individual habits so they can try to display proper ads to you.
This is absolutely no different than if you're browsing amazon.com's site logged in except that you're searching the web instead of just amazon.
Right?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
There's Google Watch.
There's Yahoo Watch.
And there's also Amazon Watch.
Amazon's privacy policy is very explicit, and they do have the generic version available that doesn't track you. Anyone who fails to use the generic version is asking for a comprehensive, personally-identifiable profile at Amazon/Alexa/a9.com that they cannot review and cannot delete. Amazon is very up front about this.
All such profiling, whether done by Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, is presently justified by the Holy Grail of "personalized search." But who needs personalized search when the cost is so high to your personal privacy? This is what the focus should be on -- criticizing all those pundits who help the profilers by trumpeting the possibilities of personalized search.
After all, 99 times out of 100 you can "personalize" any search on any search engine by merely adding one additional word in the search box to limit the results that are returned. Personalized search is for lazy people, but even these people don't deserve to be cyber-fingerprinted everywhere they go online.
You don't let a two-year-old play with matches, and you shouldn't let programmers at search engines play with "personalized search."
The irony with the "privacy concerns" over GMail or A9 is that neither is doing nothing new.
"They're reading my email!" So? The SMTP server that delivered your email read it. The Pop3/IMAP servers that display your email read it. Any spam filters or virus scanners on your email server read it. And many of these have logged the source, logged the subject, and in the case of Bayesian filters, logged keywords present in the email. Many, many computers have read your email -- but we're to be outraged that google is "diabolically" adding one more to the list?
"They're tracking my browsing!" Amazon ALREADY tracks your browsing. They follow you through every web page that has an Amazon graphic and they look up referrers to see what you like. The toolbar just makes it easier.
Honestly, guys, it's silly to get upset and threaten legislation over privacy issues with an OPTIONAL privately run service. If I want to call up Macy's and tell them everything I did today so they can suggest products I want to buy, that should be my choice. If Google and Amazon are honest about collecting this info, and people still use the service, than where's the problem? Personally, I'm less wierded out by machines offering me things automatically than I am by PEOPLE offering me things through intuition. At least no computer will ever read my spam and wonder, "What kind of a guy gets all this barnyard porn?"
Hey freaks: now you're ju
God I love Mozilla! You want spyware free browser add-ons? Check MozDev's active projects.
Search-related projects on MozdevGoogleBar- Emulates the Google toolbar that only works in IE
Companion- Emulates the Yahoo! Companion toolbar in Mozilla.
Easysearch- Offers a search toolbar with more general coverage of many search engines.
ExPASybar- Searches the ExPASy database of biomolecules.
Mycroft- Collection of search plugins for Mozilla's sidebar search (formerly known as Sherlock)
Gimli- Another project to re-create popular toolbars, starting with a dictionary.
NeedleSearch- Allows users to search using search engines installed in Mozilla, or add a new search string to the toolbar automatically.
Pubmed- Searches the NLM/Medline database of articles and citations in the field of medicine.
Qlookup- Add Google search to the context menu
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Because Amazon tells potential customers upfront what they're doing with the data generated in a search, it isn't a privacy issue.
If you agree to an interview with the local TV news anchor, are you going to whine about privacy when they run the clip at 11 o'clock?
If you don't won't Amazon to store data about you, don't use it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'll probably burn some karma for this, but I can't help but feel that there are some out there who wave the privacy flag simply in order to justify, mask or excuse their own anti-social behaviour.
No, this isn't a troll - I just think that not every story that involves someone watching what someone else is doing shoudl have life-ending privacy concerns. In this case, you have to invite the company to watch you in the first place! If I invite, say, a plumber or electrician into my house, I'm going to have to accept the fact that they may see (shock! horror!) me going about my normal everyday business.
If some of these privacy advocates had their way, none of us would talk to or interact with anyone else *ever*.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein