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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."
If the government ever does hunt for people guilty of something by searching people's searches, they are going to get a lot of false positives. There is always more people interested in, for example, bombs, than there are bombers.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
I, for one, don't mind all that much if Google saves my search inquiries, just so long as they keep the information private and (hopefully) anonymous. Google has also had a pretty damn good track record at doing just that.. Comparing them to AOL isn't even apples and oranges.. More like apples and live grenades...
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Unless you have a gmail account, and don't remember to log out and delete your Google cookies.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
"We are reasonably satisfied ... that this sort of thing would not happen at Google, although you can never say never," Schmidt said during an appearance at a major search engine conference in San Jose.
.. you could if you didnt store them.
Well
Not to mention the fact that his
You sent it as PLAINTEXT over the INTERNET.
This [or the thing against AOL] is not a story.
I couldn't care less about Google releasing all the odd shit I look for. If I was I would find a private search engine that worked over HTTPS.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yes, how dare they learn your IP!!! I mean it's only the single most important thing you need to function HTTP...Well that and a TCP stack...
Tip: If you don't want to get in trouble for googling for bomb making kits, kiddie porn or whatever else you depraved fucks look for.... don't use google.
For the rest of us looking for legal shit, I don't care. It's google server. If they want to log all my searches that's THEIR RIGHT.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is to be expected, and Google is right. Of course they won't stop storing all this information about us. Sure, it can be used for all kinds of evil purposes (but they don't do evil, right?), it could be misused, as in the recnt AOL example, or it could be used for all kinds of good things, such as having a search engine that knows what I want before I have time to enter my query.
Simpy
I however wonder what will happen when Page and Brin are gone or are sidestepped by the government.
"When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary." - Thomas Paine
Especially in a publicly traded company.
KFG
We're not talking just about an IP, we're talking about a permanent cookie that correlates all your searches to your web browser on your computer (and will stay there until you reformat or choose to delete/block said cookie). Far more information than the source/destination fields of an IPv(4|6) packet.
Also would you be OK with people watching you goto the bathroom? You wouldn't be doing anything illegal per say, but it probably would be very uncomfortable to have the whole neighbor and possibly a couple DOJ investigators watching you. The type of stance that 'it's legal, i have nothing to hide, who cares' lowers the expectation for privacy among us and signals that the erosion of our collective privacy is A-O.K.
--postmodern
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.
The ignorance in this statement is so staggering that I had to respond and lose the moderations I've made on other posts to this story.
If you have any account online for which you have ever disclosed your true identity (like in order to make a purchase) then that account information can and will be cross-referenced with all of the tracking data that the tracking companies have been able to put together on you. They are expectionally good at finding those information leaks and putting 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 together to make 4.
Don't be lulled into a false sense of security even if you are the type to disable cookies. Cookies are not the only way Doubleclick and the like track people. Embedded images, tags, 3rd party style sheets with god knows what javascript, ip address correlation, etc. The bag of tricks is practically bottomless.
I religiously use the following extensions to Firefox, with almost every site fully locked out, and even then I still leak personal information like a seive:
NoScript
CookieSafe
AdBlock Plus
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
On a somewhat related note: i'm interested in the way Google set up their registration for Gmail. You have to be "invited" by someone else. This means that if they saved all the links between people, which i'm sure they did, they could see the network of people all around the world. They could see how many steps any person is separated from another.
Like someone said a few posts aboove, all the saved searches do amount to a very interesting sample of peoples minds. In the same way, Gmail registration data will be an interesting sample of human networking.
Waiting for you by the bridge
I bet his imaginary girlfriend's cat can still run a better ISP than AOL. So his point is valid, just misleading and incomplete.
The Farewell Tour II
Now another thought: what if... (big if), somehow the religious extreme right gets into power and decides that all donkey-sex lovers are perverts and deviants. You might find yourself fired, imprisonned or "re-educated". It's really not so hard to find yourself in a group you'd rather not be associated with.
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
Executive summary:
Don't assume anything you type into a search form isn't being logged with as much information, including your IP, that they can gather. Search accordingly.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
No matter what safeguards are in place, ANY company like this is only one stupid intern away from a similar situation as AOL faces. Even if there's absolutely no malicious intent, information like this tends to have a very low vapor pressure. The information exists, and as the AOL incident points out, people want the information (as witnessed by the incredible number of articles, websites, and discussions about the content of the AOL database).
Someone will eventually screw up. It's inevitable. It's Murphy's Law... if it can happen, it will... especially given an ample number of opportunities. And there's lots of opportunities for someone to mis-handle this data.
I'm usually fairly on top of things like this, but to be honest, until this happened, I didn't know that Google Personal Search History existed. And apparently the default is to save the history and have it attached to my gmail account. I've now deleted the history and paused the data collection, but does that mean it's really gone? How do I know... maybe it's just hidden for now and not really gone. And it's a little bothersome that the default is to keep the data. The default should be to not save it attached to any sort of personally identifiable informaion unless I give explicit, and repeated, permission to do so.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Google News - Top Searches in 2005
1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter
Yup, a real asset.
By law, if google were to ever face bankruptcy, they would be forced to sell off all assets. This holds true for every company, so privacy policies effectively mean nothing. No matter what any company says about keeping your personal data secret, that data is considered intellectual property of the company and WILL be sold to the highest bidder come chapter 11. They legally have no choice in the matter.
Finkployd