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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."
what does google have to do with any of this? it's somehow news that google somehow is confident that they aren't a bunch of total fuckups like AOL?
my girlfriend's cat could run an ISP better than AOL
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
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 know this one guy who asked me to cancel his account last week, and a couple days later his mom found out about his lesbian penguin grits fetish. Now, I'm not threatening you, or anything. I'm a reasonable guy. I'm just sayin', you might want to give that some more thought, Mr. cheating-on-wife-on-the-down-low..."
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."
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.
"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
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.
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
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
/)
Although he was alarmed by Slashdot's haphazard release of its users' online replies, CEO CmdrTaco said Wednesday the privacy concerns raised by that breach won't change his website's practice of storing posts made by it's users.
... that this sort of thing would not happen at Slashdot, although you can never say never," CmdrTaco said during an appearance at a major website conference in Walla Walla, WA.
"We are reasonably satisfied
The security breakdown, disclosed earlier this week, publicly exposed about 19 million replies made by over 1 million Slashdot posters during the three months ended in May. OSTG's Slashdot intended to release the data exclusively to spammers and government spooks, but the information somehow surfaced on the Internet and was widely ignored.
The lapse provided a glaring example of how the information that people post on the website can provide a window into their embarrassing, or even potentially incriminating _ wishes and desires. The replies leaked by Slashdot included condemnations of the current government as well an infatuation with Natalie Portman and hot grits.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
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