Slashdot Mirror
Last Day To Tell Google To Forget You
itwbennett writes "Google's new privacy policy will consolidate all your data at google.com — unless you erase it first. And today is your last day to do it. The change goes into effect tomorrow. Which is why the helpful folks at EFF have posted some simple instructions showing how to delete your web history at Google."
Yes they track you - Or at least try as hard as they can. It also means that you're not really affected by this as the data is not associated with a Google account.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
If you're not signed in, they store your history for 180 days, but you can opt-out of that without a Google account: http://www.google.com/history/optout
I believe it was opt-in for a long time, but then it became opt-out for (new?) accounts. The change was announced here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html
This does in fact appear to be true. I happen to have two google accounts, as I have two @gmail.com addresses. When I went to the newer one, my entire search history was there as I apparently didn't realize I had to opt out when I set it up. It has now been deleted per the EFF instructions. When I logged in to the older one, it said web history wasn't enabled, and so that account must have been created while web history was still opt-in.
From their website (http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54067):
You can remove all Web History from your Google Account at any time. While signed in to your Google Account:
Go to google.com/history.new window
Click Remove all web history.
However, as is common practice in the industry, and as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users.
(emphasis mine)
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
I would also suggest setting your browser to delete all cookies when closing. By installing Cookie Monster for Firefox you can selectively allow some sites to set permanent cookies, that persist over browser sessions (e.g. your Slashdot login).
Looks like you slashdotted the EFF. Site is down.
Facts have a liberal bias.
... because you haven't enabled Web History for your domain, so there's nothing to erase.
If, for some reason, you want Web History enabled on your domain, you can do it from the domain control panel.
Hey Tharsman, try: https://www.google.com/history/lookup?q=&output=rss&num=100 where you can replace "num=100" with "num=100000" or whatever... didn't test for upper limit, but I will later :D
(info from http://www.dataliberation.org.../ if this is a dictatorship, it could be worse)
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
Me too. I went in to wipe out my history, and even though I have gmail and youtube accounts, there's no web history. Somewhere along the line the people stirring up Google paranoia neglected to mention that almost nobody has this 'web history' thing enabled. If I as a regular Slashdot reading google user was never prompted to set this up, and didn't even know how to get to the page where you set it up, I imagine the affected population's pretty small.
Am I missing something?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...