Slashdot Mirror
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."
Everyone knows that Google is really a front for the NSA. Think about it, massive quantities of data, searches
that can be corealated and traced back to individual users, gmail storing and 'indexing' all your mail, it's
the governments wet dream.
Just wait until Windows-Live services take off , and G-Drive as well. Why not have all your data ready for inspection
by the nice people at the NSA.
'scuse me, there's a knock on the door, the folks from the black pizza van prolly wanna ask for directions.
Storing every single search performed by every person in the world across a whole epoch could pretty much give you the pulse of the world.
Watching as news spreads and worries and concerns grow or when good news occurs or even just good publicity, there are millions of people all adding entries into the real hitchhikers guide.
Google will be almost certain of knowing the current number one chart hit at any location on Earth at any time simply by the concentration of searches for that artist/song, it could follow gun culture or tv plotlines or anything flowing into its servers.
In the right hands, this could become an amazing asset for the whole world. I believe the current owners of google are primed to achieve such a feat.
I however wonder what will happen when Page and Brin are gone or are sidestepped by the government.
liqbase
Do not forget that
a) Google keeps a permanent cookie
b) If you ever used gmail, that same cookie has been linked to your permanent cookie
We need something that will keep those results private, something such as:
a) Greasmonkey/adblock setup to disallow google searches access to the cookie
b) Automated searching tools that will pollute ones searches with fakes,
c) Deeper leveled (ie Proxomitron / privoxy ) scripts that clear this out
and while here, I would like to talk about clusty.com, they have a fantastic privacy policy, I encourage you to read it: http://clusty.com/privacy
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Permanent cookie?
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 doubt mine is anything close to permanent.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I have it on good authority that AOL saves not only your searches[...]
You don't need good authority for that. An obviousness helmet is all you need.
The difference here is that Google makes its living on an (ever increasing) income of advertisement money, whereas AOL's business model revolves around steady income from their (albeit dwindling number of) subscribers. Google want their data kept private more than you want that particular data kept private (and this is the crucial point in all privacy discussion on Google) in order to keep their core business model intact. All the while AOL are willing to put the exact same data for sale to the highest bidder, since it isn't strictly relevant to their core business model.
My spoon is too big.
Every search engine logs your queries. This is the way it is. If they tell you they don't log the queries, they're lying. The difference is that they don't make it available. In a previous life I worked with several search companies you've heard of on various search related technologies, and they *never* released query logs. Even cleansed the data were kept close to the chest. Queries are going to be logged with the IP address of the user. Some engines will track click-throughs on the results as well. That data is invaluable to a search engine.
AOL's faux pas here was attaching personal information to the queries themselves: once that per-user identifier was attached all bets were off.
If you are interested in working with query data, and do not work for a search company, you are shit out of luck, because you can't otherwise get this data. All of the research published on queries was done by Alta Vista, Google, Yahoo, Lycos, MSN... research on spelling correction of search queries is done by the same groups: they're the only ones with access to that data, until this AOL release (or older releases from other companies.)
Having this data is a boon for researchers, but a net loss for people.
That's true, but I'm not worried about them finding out that I once read up on explosives. In fact, I'd be just fine if I trusted that they were only finding bombers with that stuff.
I'm more worried that some day I'll be a reasonably successful businessman (however unlikely), with a big mouth. Then they'll go find all the most vulgar shit my friends and I have swapped via email and use it as a, "look what a f'ing weirdo this guy is... lets have DCFS take his kids because he replied 'ha ha' to that awful video way back in 2002."