Google Changes Privacy Policy

jemecki writes "Yahoo reports that Google has updated their privacy policy on user data collection. The new policy now explicitly states that 'Google may use personal information to display customized content and advertising, develop new services and ensure that its network continues to function.' It also adds that employees who violate the policy will be fired and prosecuted. They have also added a Cliffs Notes version of their privacy policy for those who don't want to RTFPP."

Comments

Known for years

[green pizza]

I think Google is simply making their privacy policy a bit more clear. It has been known for years that, at the very least, they log the IP address and search string for every request that hits their servers.

It might be fun to have a "what has this IP adress searched for?" feature to sift thru the google logs. Then again, it might uncover some scary stuff.

Re:Known for years

[EnronHaliburton2004]

They also use Cookies to create an individual profile for each visitor, and log that information. Google provides personalized services like Gmail, Google Groups, and http://www.google.com/ig to further the usefulness for those individual profiles (Visitors are less likely to block cookies, more likely to try to maintain the same login information on different computers).

I'm not saying this is wrong--- thousands of websites do this same thing. The data is only useful in aggregate anyways-- there aren't many business reasons to look at an individual's browsing habits. There are valid business reasons to look at a GROUP of browsing habits.

Re:Known for years

[garcia]

It might be fun to have a "what has this IP adress searched for?" feature to sift thru the google logs. Then again, it might uncover some scary stuff.

If you keep your own webserver logs and the users don't hide their referrer strings (99% of them don't) then you could do that on your own website from the numerous search engines.

I could only imagine what data large sites can come up with from the information passed during searches. Hell, it absolutely amazes me on my little tiny site and I only get about 100k hits a month.

Re:Google prefetching top hit?

[Rude Turnip]

That is a feature in Firefox of which Google takes advantage. If you're using Firefox at work, however, you should look up how to turn off prefetching. I've read about people getting canned because the first site in the search results (even though not actively clicked on) was a pr0n site that got preloaded.

Re:Google prefetching top hit?

[lupinstel]

For those who don't know, this is done by typing "about:config" in the address bar. Then filter or search for "network.prefetch-next" and set the value to false.