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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."
"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
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
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
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.