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Personalized Search From Google Now Opt-Out
An anonymous reader writes "CNet reports that 'Google now intends to deliver customized search results even to those searching its site without having signed into a Google account.' This may be what finally drives me to seriously experiment with cookie-free browsing. I consider non-personalized search results to be of value. They quasi-subconsciously give me a better perspective of the full range of information and ideas on the net. That, and I'm also a bit paranoid about a coming world with push-button infrastructure for personalized mis/disinformation."
How is this a bad thing exactly? With such changes Google makes it will only help you get better search results, maybe other people get better results too somehow and it will help Google target advertisements better which benefits not just Google but advertisers and consumers too. How does this pose enough a threat for you to turn your cookies off?
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
I'd wonder how it'll affect users of this nice Firefox extension...
I'd suggest Scroogle (https://ssl.scroogle.org/ -- Google sans the crap), but it seems down at the moment. Cue the conspiracy theories in 3, 2, 1 ...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The use of the phrase "quasi-subconsciously" is fascinating. The rest, not so much.
I use a proxy as my default search service, like this:
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?q=google+is+collecting+your+data
There may also be others, but this one has worked for me.
Downsides: no cached or similar pages, no searchable search history, no cute math results, none of the value-add search links or maps at the top of the results - just the plain search results.
Upside: no data collection on my searches. (if I believe that the proxy is not also collecting data), you can also set it to give 100 search results as the default.
This may be what finally drives me to seriously experiment with cookie-free browsing.
I've been doing this for a few years thanks to Firefox. Set your preferences to accept cookies (maybe 3rd party, too, depending on where you browse), but then set it to clear them when you close Firefox. Then click on the 'exceptions' button and make a whitelist of the handful of sites where you want to actually keep persistent cookies (slashdot, any forums or webshops you frequent, etc). Every time you close firefox, your Google cookie will be tossed, along with most of the others.
Your personalized search history will still be based on a cookie even if you're not logged in.
All the spam cookies generating extra page loads to doubleclick et al weren't enough to get you to install CS Lite? You must be running a supercomputer on a private T3. By the way, when a story like this comes from "An Anonymous Reader" I can't help but think "Unabomber". Wasn't there something about a push-button infrastructure for personalized mis/disinformation in his manifesto? Only people hiding in shacks and never speaking to other humans are vulnerable to personalized misinformation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This in built 'subjectivity' in the search mechanism represents a kind of fragmentation of the commons the searchable Internet supposedly represents: sometimes I want to know what other people know, what they are looking at, what is popular or interesting for them.
Secondly, grouping searches around an assumption of my interests assumes that my interests are 1/ Statistically quantifiable (solving a loathesome and boring problem may result in many queries), 2/ Particular to me (I may be searching for someone else, or my computer could be shared with another), 3/ Can be built from clear-text (sometimes I might be searching within a context do take me to a binary, like a video, arbitrarily linked in a page (like the comments for instance)).
Finally, isn't there a problem with diminishing returns here? The set that represents my interests will get 'smaller' in subject matter as I continue to search within that set.
I'll certainly be switching if Google's approximation of my interests goes under the radar, digging into cookies when I'm 'signed out'.
Are there any Firefox plugins out there that randomly alter the values stored in certain cookies?
I think Google apologizers has become worse than Apple apologizers but let me try one more time.
If you install current Google maps to your Symbian phone (possibly others soon) and "reset it", it will send your personal "favorites" (read: locations saved) to Google, without even asking you. For example "Grandma's home" goes from your personal phone memory to Google, instantly.
It must have sort of "opt out" too of course but it doesn't change the fact that Google really looks like some sort of information vampire, trying to get all data from you, especially personal ones.
One day in future, looking to their horrible image among customers and several government/private investigations going on, they will ask themselves "What did we do wrong?" but it will be too late for them. My "citation"? MS history in 1990s. Quote from the book "No Logo" (sorry, double translated) "It was a cool thing to work at Microsoft but whatever happened in no time, people started to stare at us like we work for Philip Morris."
Sorry, but it's true. I'm not either. The internet seems to have made everyone out there think they're being watched, studied, and examined 24/7. As if people really care what you've been searching for any reason beyond showing relevant ads and making search better.
People thinking that there's someone over at Google wringing their hands together and laughing maniacally because they have your recent searches need to get over themselves. They're not spying on you for some nefarious purpose, it's to give you better results. You'd probably be a much happier person if you just dealt with it.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
If people didn't fixate themselves to single search engine and use whatever fits best for that particular search or basically, whatever they feel like using that day, this needless monopoly and the issues coming with it would be instantly over.
Why is it a nightmare to track P2P? It is the randomness, multiple services, technologies, hosts, habits changing instantly etc.
What we need is some sort of revolution in size of Gnutella, Wikipedia, Bittorrent. Some invention that really works and actually used/liked by average user. If it is good enough, it will be adopted. I don't think gnutella, bittorrent or wikipedia did multi billion ad campaigns.
Just needs to be easier to manage, Radio button:
O Customize (Personalise) Searches: Yes/No
Auto-delete cookies when closing the browser. It's not that complicated, and while it costs you some extra time (logging on etc.), it might be less than you thought it would. I've been doing it for 5 years now.
I've had my browser cookies turned off for 8 years. I only use cash to make purchases. I don't even use the bathroom in my house because I'm worried THEY are watching what I'm eating. Sure my basement is filled with mason jars filled with crap, but it isn't as difficult as you might think. You also get used to the smell after a while. It is a small price to pay to not have the government know what I'm eating/drinking.
Have you realized where it goes to if you go to .com instead of .org?
Someone wrote a book last year saying how more and more of the polarization in the U.S. is because people are segregating themselves into neighborhoods based on politics. Do you want to leave someplace with Whole Foods and yoga studios, or with megachurches and gun shops? This Google move seems to be taking this same segregation on-line. Google "climate change"....hmmm, I see this person's been to Fox News recently...better send 'em to a denial site. Or, more generally, once you get stuck in an affinity group, Google results are going to tend to keep you there. Seems like this is just going to amplify the echo chamber effect that lets so many people veer off into idiotic extremism.
But can you OPT OUT without signing up for a Google account?
(I can already find this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines thanks)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
one question... will this affect my porn habbit?
I'm not up to speed with what's available or feasible technically, but I have been thinking a bit about the structure of searching. In particular, I've been trying to work out how de-centralised searching could work, or, at least, work it out conceptually (I don't work in a computer related field). My first thoughts were trying to see if there could be a model similar to that used by bittorrent, or at least what I understand of bittorrent (never having used it).
It seems to me that one of the features that has made the internet so useful, and powerful, is that the important functions are de-centralised. And that the search function, a very important one, is odd-man-out in this respect.
Best wishes,
Bob
I think if everyone's laundry were out in the open, we could stop pretending that some people's laundry is always clean.
I noticed the other day when I went to the YouTube homepage that the recommendations it gave me were videos that closely conformed with my actual interests. Except I hadn't "logged in" yet.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Does pope wear a funny hat? Do bears shit in the woods? Isn't that the only sensible thing to do?
Fucking moran. (sic)
The beauty of the web was that everything was available to everyone. It was free, as in speech and beer. But this is going fast. Google's effort to personalize search is only the lastest from the big corporations to turn the web into one long seemless commercial, and to turn the users into commodities.
I'd like to think that I can control my searching by altering my search terms. Google and Microsoft and many others would like to identify me and give me what sells best no matter what I ask for.
Their way of doing this is to find a way to describe me through my web history. I doubt that this is any more possible than the phrenology of a century ago, but I can't decide whether it's worse for them to keep trying and failing, or for them to actually figure out how the system work accurately. Either way, my search is poorer for being limited by their manipulations.
Well, I sure ain't skerd
I like the forms feature. I most particularly use it [on comuters under my physical control] to keep track of my login names on sites I may not visit frequently. I don't want to clear my form history to clear my search history, as they advise and have good reason to believe it would help much if I did. Perhaps the Waltham MA Google center is running some sort of experimental "improvement", but they seem to track more than cookies and browser history
Though I have loved Google for over a decade, I dislike Personalized Search strongly. I've always minimized logins, and clear cookies frequently, but it has been increasingly skewing my Google results for at lest a year.
I know how to craft a search, so why not give me the results I request without adding your proprietary invisible weighting? Or let me set the weighting: I'd been doing that on a wide variety of search engines for years before the Web or Google existed, before Google's search experts (definitely smarter than I) had graduated college, but instead of increasing my options, they've silently decreased/disabled many search refinement options
I can name one good reason, BTW: ease -- not my ease, but their computational load through pre-indexing, etc.
At one time, I used "relatively virgin computers" (e.g. one I normally use for analog data acquisition/analysis) to get impartial results, but in the past year, even fresh OS installs haven't gotten me the same results I get when I travel. I strongly suspect Google is keying their indexes by IP, but changing my Google links to pass through a public proxy may only introduce a different bias, more diffuse, but still not geared to my requests!
Here's a novel idea: search for what I ask for, and give me the options that will help me narrow my search. This sort of "I know better than you" helpfulness is one of the fastest ways to turn me off a system.
IMHO, a lot of the "what-ifs" people are positing have already begun to happen. For example, I run a modest website on the side, under 1.5 million posts, a tiny peripheral mote in the Dust storm of the Internet -- but whether I am logged in or not, I often get results from my own site on my first page of results, even when the topic is less than 24 hours old, is a rare/unique topic on that site; and *is* covered widely by many other sites, larger than my own. That may tickle some webmaster egos, but it's terrible behavior, and I can't shut it off, even with a fresh install.
I'm especially sick of getting the same already-read results on the first page, then finding the answer I wanted on a search from a hotel, cafe -- or a colleague's workplace. (Do I seem as great a fool to them as they sometimes seem to me, just because Google presents information prominently to one, but not the other?
Wouldn't this feature tend to lead to confirmation bias in the search results? To me, that radically diminishes the value of the search...
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
I don't accept cookies I don't know I want, and I don't run scripts I don't know I need to run. It's not that big of a hassle. Firefox's addons, cookiesafe (let's you decide what cookies you accept), noscript (we all should know about that), and BetterPrivacy (blocks lso cookies), will protect your privacy, and your computer from exploits. I'm all for surfing the web default-deny. There is no reason every website I visit should be able to run whatever scripts they want and tag my computer with cookies. And it gets rid of 90% of adds too, as a fringe benefit.
How come the tin-foil hatters never seem to bring up the fact that you can simply vote with your feet if you don't like Google's privacy policies? Is Google pointing a gun at your head forcing you to use Google instead of Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com? The reality is those sites are probably collecting just as much information about you as Google is but they don't get nearly the same amount of attention.
You can't opt out government surveillance but there are plenty of ways to opt out of Google's.
Might as well ask them to pull out a gun and shoot their own foot. What should be changed are browser defaults to "delete new cookies on exit", and make it a special opt-in to allow the site to set permanent cookies. If I go to the cookies page after a surfing session, there are tons and tons of sites that have no legitimate reason to leave cookies other than to track me. Permanent cookies should be handled by a info bar in the same way as popup windows, "Allow this site to set permantent cookies?". That would cut down cookie abuse massively.
For more than 10 years now, my personal browser settings have included "delete ALL cookies on exit". For me, cookies exist only while my browser is open. Works great for browsing throughout the day while my computer is on. When I close the browser, it's all gone.
It's sometimes a pain to have to login to every web site that I use (work webmail, Gmail for my domain, my general Gmail, Sourceforge, Facebook, etc) but I think it's a bit more secure. [I know, my Flash cookies are still there...]
I originally did it because, as a laptop user, I didn't want to have to worry about my web accounts getting compromised because my laptop got stolen or lost. If the laptop goes missing, I know the bad guy isn't able to access my web accounts - and my Gmail accounts are important to me.
I hope you got an insanely powerful password for your Google account since it is NOT a "cloud", it is plain old server, owned by some gigantic company who has amazing powerful PR capabilities and close ties to media.
I bet you will install multi billion dollar worth "turn by turn" navigation when Google offers it for free, you will never, ever ask "Why do they offer this thing free to me while others have to ask for money?".
You sir, are the new privacy ignorant type who Google created.
If you have, make sure you delete your cookies before you search for "midget gay porn".
Just what we need in the Global Warming / Climategate (or any other) debate. Users by default when trying to research the scientific evidence to support or contradict their pre-existing prejudice, will overwhelmingly be presented with search results that primarily support that prejudice.
And google forcing me to set a cookie in order to opt-out of their use of cookies to track me and customize my search results? Wow. That's rich.
How is this a bad thing exactly? With such changes Google makes it will only help you get better search results, maybe other people get better results too somehow and it will help Google target advertisements better which benefits not just Google but advertisers and consumers too. How does this pose enough a threat for you to turn your cookies off?
This will ruin SEO. I'm sure new/small businesses getting online will not be happy.
So, how exactly to you OPT-OUT? I've been searching the google settings for my account and can't find anything that allows me to opt out of customized search results.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature_lets_users
Unless you're already browsing cookie-free, Google is already looking over your shoulder 100% of the time. This doesn't change anything. Google is simply putting all that information they already collect to good use.
Actually, for my own curiosity I'd be interested in the recommendations for alternate search engines that slashdotters think are good one to use, other than google. (Probably this has been covered as a slashdot topic before; so a link would be ok.)
(I can already find this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines thanks)
Starpage.com. No IP logging, no tracking cookies (there is a preference cookie), lets you search over HTTPS, compiles search data from All The Web, Ask, Bing, Cuil, Digg, EntireWeb, Gigablast, Open Directory, Qkport, Wikipedia, and Yahoo.
Overall it works pretty well, but sometimes I need Google's results. That's where Scroogle comes in handy. No cookies, no query logging, ip logs deleted after 48 hours.
Also, if you're using Firefox there are a few settings I highly recommend under Privacy. Set it to "Use custom settings for history", uncheck "Accept third-party cookies", and then change "Keep until" to "I close Firefox". Then use "Exceptions" to whitelist any sites you want to have persistent cookies.
I also tend to use Privoxy + JAP when doing casual browsing (ie, stuff where I don't log in).
What bothers me most about this is that in order to "opt-out" you have to give them some additional way of tracking you so your opt out persists. Which means they increase the base of people they are tracking even more.
Just some advice that I give friends and family:
* Delete all cookies in your browser every week - it is easy enough to sign in again to web sites that require authentication. People who do not delete their cookies never see what sites are tracking them. It is easiest to do a 'delete all cookies' operation and not to try to save the 5 or 10 cookies out of thousands that are stored in your local browser data.
* Keep a text file with all passwords in encrypted form - and, do not use the same password for different purposes.
* Every time you use your super market's discount card (or possibly pay with a credit card), your purchases are permanently associated with you - do you care? maybe or maybe not.
I do use a lot of web services that track what I do (GMail, for example) but I make the decision to give up privacy vs. benefits on a service by service basis.
The guy who runs it, Daniel Brandt, is completely nuts. An article appeared on Wikipedia about him. What was his solution to this, when it became clear that he couldn't delete it himself and he couldn't get the Wikipedia grand panjandrums to delete it? He put together a huge list of the personal info of every Wikipedia person he could find, including pictures and identifying information for several Wiki-administrators who are children. Brandt pretty much matches the definition of evil.
Let me fix that:
Why would anyone want to "friend" a corporation is beyond me but now if you have a product it needs a facebook account. I don't know you but this attitude shift seems prevalent in slashdot now most articles about the GPL is about how much it sucks and every comment about Microsoft is about how they are not evil etc.
The pro versus anti corporate ratio in slashdot changed in the last 2 years and while every anti-privacy comment has 2-3 pro-privacy replies the anti-privacy ones are usually the earliest and more highly up modded ones.
I don't know if it is paid shilling or the September effect, I suspect the later but the former wouldn't surprise me. What really gets me is that a ton of these articles start with "I know slashdoters are a bunch of RMS zealots but..." or "tinfoil hats" or "microsoft haters..."
What the hell are they talking about? Haven't they read /. recently? We love Microsoft! We hate privacy and while we like Open Source we hate Free Software (More like Un-Free Software *nudge*nudge*) with uses Stallman's egomaniacal redefinition of freedom which includes fascism and AIDS etc, etc, etc...
But... the future refused to change.
The instructions say to go to "Web History" in the top right corner of the search results page.
I too, don't have "Web History", only "Search Settings" and "Sign In".
Perhaps it's not implemented yet? I don't know.
( http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048 )
This is what it says: Signed in searches To disable history-based search customizations while signed in, you'll need to remove Web History from your Google Account. You can also choose to remove individual items. Note that removing this service deletes all your old searches from Web History. Signed out searches If you aren't signed in to a Google Account, your search experience will be customized based on past search information linked to a cookie on your browser. To disable history-based customizations, follow these steps: 1. In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History. 2. On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.(Because this preference is stored in a cookie, it'll affect anyone else who uses the same browser and computer as you). Or, if you'd rather just delete the current cookie storing searches from your browser and start fresh, clear your browser's cookies.