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Google to Continue Storing Search Requests
isabotage3 writes "Although he was alarmed by AOL's haphazard release of its subscribers' online search requests, Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt said Wednesday the privacy concerns raised by that breach won't change his company's practice of storing the inquiries made by its users."
Have your browser reject cookies from Google. You won't be able to use Gmail or orkut or some other services, but Web search, video search, etc. will work. Unless they drill into your connection to find your MAC address, or always search from the same IP, you're reasonably okay.
A search proxy will prevent establishign ip and user identity with search terms and tracking of results clicked on. Get hip to it. Alot of services exist. This is my fav http://www.blackboxsearch.com/
No, they don't have to when they redirect through someone who does keep records. I just went there and did a search and when I clicked on a link it redirected me through http://www23.overture.com/d/sr/?xargs= with a bunch of arguments and tried to set a cookie and then transparently redirected me to the original link as if nothing happened. It looks like there is a lot of information passed in the URL to overture.com. Just what is overture.com? Hmmm, take a look:
http://www.overture.com/
I think I'll stick with Google thank you.
In FireFox 1.5.x
e r=13273w er=13285
Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy Tab -> Cookies -> Exceptions
Then add the Google domains you wish to block/allow. This will result in many random cookies being generated by Google for each search done (as they will think you are a new comer each time). Personally I white-list all my cookies, only allowing the sites I trust to set cookies, which are then automatically cleared when I close FireFox.
Also do not use GMail via the web interface, it is possible to use GMail via an email client residing on your computer.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans
From there you can use your choice of email Encryption/Steganography as you see fit.
You can only be controlled, if you allow it.
You can only be surveyed, if you are unaware of or ignore it.
It's your choice.
They cleared that out. They said they'll keep them until they fall off the backup roll. What do you expect, that they nuke them from orbit the second you delete them ?
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Why bother when the FireFox extension CustomiseGoogle contains an anonymise cookie option, this will ensure that google works as you expect, but ensures that the cookie they use to corellate your searches with your gmail with your google maps searches (your house for one) with your price shopping with your groups searches with your images searches is changed every now and again. No loss of functionality, complete maintenance of privacy.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
all data between you and the first tor node is encrypted, and all data between that tor node and the next one in the chain is encrypted under a different key, and all data between that one and the next one under yet another key, etc.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I set cookies to delete automatically when closing FF and have used some combination of tools or manually doing it at least weekly for years.
I think this is kinda funny.
The whole original point of cookies was to make a user's life easier. You don't need to log into Slashdot every time you visit the page. You only need to authenticate with GMail or Yahoo once a day to read email. Your shopping cart is remembered. Etc, etc, and yet people are so paranoid that they still clear them out on a regular basis.
It's true that there's some data mining involved, but I think it's trivial enough that it's not worth the extra effort (IMO anyway). So what if Doubleclick (may they burn in Hell forever) knows that some guy visits Slashdot, ThinkGeek, and PennyArcade? I figure my privacy is fine as long as they cannot link the activity back to me personally. If that bothers you, whitelisting sites makes it pretty easy to weed out data miners, though it can become a pain when sites use cookies for navigation, shopping, etc.
One tip I do have for IE users, is to try out the Restricted Sites zone. I've added a few sites to it and it drastically speeds up page loads. For example, Dilbert.com used to be slow and ad-ridden with popups, but after adding it to Restricted Sites, it has no cookies and no JavaScript which means no ads, no popups, no nothing. Page loads are 500% faster.
I use my Windows credentials to secure my computer and enjoy the typing saved by not clearing my cookies every ten minutes.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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They offer something like this called Google Trends.....
http://scroogle.org/
Try the Scroogle Scraper. No Google cookie,
No Google search tied to your IP address.
No advertizements. While you're there, donate.
Actually, you already have access to quite a bit of that data. (Aggregated, of course.)
a b=0&geo=all&date=all
i xie+chicks
Slashdot vs. Digg
http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2Cdigg&ct
Britney Spears vs. Dixie Chicks
http://www.google.com/trends?q=britney+spears%2Cd
Another approach, if you are using Firefox, is to set cookies to be cleared at the end of your browser session. Then use the Permit Cookies extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/44/) to whitelist sites you trust, like Slashdot. That way, Gmail will work, but your cookie will not persist across browsing sessions.
Be warned though, Google will still be aware of your "trail" through Adsense sites during your browser session. As soon as you log in to Gmail, your Adsense trail will be linked to an actual email account. It's annoying, but with a little practice, I've learned to visit Gmail only during a fresh browsing session.
While I don't like the ubiquity of Google advertising, my real concern is something like AOL or the DOJ. I trust Google not to be evil, but accidents happen and evil sometimes triumphs over the will of good people. It sucks that this is the world we live in, but what can ya do?
Yeah it'll help. But you should just get a FF extension like customize google which does it for you every time. Thats assuming you run FF.
As a bonus it also does lots of other neat stuff.
:x
What information could Google release/lose/etc if the data was not protected? According to their privacy policy Google records the following information in their server logs:
i ght=c4171#c4171
Here is an example of a typical log entry where the search is for "cars", followed by a breakdown of its parts:
* 123.45.67.89 - 25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 - http://www.google.com/search?q=cars - Firefox 1.0.7; Windows NT 5.1 - 740674ce2123e969
* 123.45.67.89 is the Internet Protocol address assigned to the user by the user's ISP; depending on the user's service, a different address may be assigned to the user by their service provider each time they connect to the Internet;
* 25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 is the date and time of the query;
* http://www.google.com/search?q=cars is the requested URL, including the search query;
Firefox 1.0.7; Windows NT 5.1 is the browser and operating system being used; and
* 740674ce2123a969 is the unique cookie ID assigned to this particular computer the first time it visited Google. (Cookies can be deleted by users. If the user has deleted the cookie from the computer since the last time s/he visited Google, then it will be the unique cookie ID assigned to the user the next time s/he visits Google from that particular computer).
See http://www.omninerd.com/2006/01/25/news/489?highl
Use the Google scraper at http://www.scroogle.org/
er kid before you give me a lecture on the best way to suck eggs you might want to go back to school for a few years and see if you can brush up your understanding of how the internet works, and then maybe try and brush up some of your social skills.
the tubes meme is a meme because it is a convenient shorthand for getting across the instance of a manbadly explaining something he clearly doesn't understand, to a bunch of people who's job it is to make informed decisions about that subjects future.
his whole performance is so critically flawed that it is pointless to address your "deserving points of criticism", because the whole thing is a joke.
the internet in fact is just as much like a dump truck as it is a series of tubes because both are rubbish analogies that don't give the listener any greater sense of what the internet is or how it works than they started with.
the reason i would make fun of the senator for alaska is not for the tubes analogy, but for the whole bloody speech.
to quote Wittgenstein "Of that which we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent"
or as Mark Twain put it "Tis better keep your mouth shut and be thought of as an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt".