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Google Adds Search History Feature
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google has released My Search History (Beta). Login with your Google account (like your Gmail account), and a search history feature will be integrated right into the Google.com homepage. You can then retrieve pages you've previously found by either clicking on calendar dates, or by performing a full-text search. Other features are available as well."
When this feature is enabled, Google adds an "onmousedown" event to the search result links which makes you hit their servers first, and then they redirect you to the page you requested. You might not even notice this is happening since you can't see in the status bar that the URL you are visiting is different. (And since they are not using any status bar text changing tricks to fool you, the Firefox settings to prevent people from changing the status bar text would have no effect, obviously.)
::cough michael ::cough) ought to love this.
I think this feature is pretty damn cool, and I have no reason not to trust Google will adhere to their privacy policy and not abuse this information. I am sure the privacy nuts (i.e. those that like to have knee-jerk reactions to anything that even hints at privacy implications
You can turn the tracking off easily by pressing the "pause" button in your Google History page, or by going to your google account settings and selecting "Delete History." I verified this causes the onmousedown code to disappear completely.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
However, if you turn this service on, they also track which links you click on in the search results.
They're also then able to tie all of your IP addresses together.
Upon your first visit to Google, a cookie is sent to your computer that uniquely identifies your browser.
Yes, and upon my first visit to google, I told Firefox to deny the cookie and deny any further cookies from google.com. So yes, they can track my usage between different IP addresses, but I seriously doubt they're tracking all my searches throughout my entire lifetime (it's possible, but it'd be pretty hard and without getting a subpoena from my ISP it'd probably just be a best guess).
I don't see a problem with either thing since they are up-front about what they are doing and the privacy policy is clear about how they use this information.
Well, I see a problem with it, in that I don't want to be tracked in this way. But as long as they're upfront about it I don't think they're doing anything unethical.
One thing they aren't upfront about is just how long they keep this data. If it's only a month or two, it's not so bad. But if they keep a record of every search that someone has done in her lifetime, I think that's pretty bad.