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."

Comments

Re:TIME TO DUMP GOOGLE

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Counter-Measure for Cookies

[Anonymous Coward]

In FireFox 1.5.x

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?answe r=13273
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ er=13285

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.

Re:The differance

[nmb3000]

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.