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."
Gots no Google account, so does that mean they dont track me or that I cant erase the tracking data?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'm confused. The new policy goes into effect March 1 and today is the last day to erase the old?
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
I already did this years ago, but thank you for pointing it out to those who were not aware of such a setting. I'm sure the government is still monitoring all of this through Echelon though, which makes this meaningless.
Did I say that out loud? Shit sorry.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
tried to, but it turned out I never enabled this "history" in the first place (or at least Google says so). Am I safe?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Just did that. But I'd done it already, and Google claims my web history is "paused". Which probably means they will "unpause" it silently at some future time.
There's this annoying trend towards invisible buttons for things web sites don't want you to do. There's no obvious "sign out" button for Google now. Clicking on your user name will get you to a sign-out option, but it's not obvious. Facebook actually has invisible buttons for opting out of ads. (They're at the right of the ad headline. Mouse over that blank area and a "x" will appear. Click on the "x" and some opt-out options will appear. They don't actually make the advertiser go away, though.)
Google can only associate your searches with your account if you're logged in. If you don't want them to remember your searches, don't log in. Log in to use YouTube when you want to, then log out when you're done.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
I went to the history page, but there is no "remove all Web History" button or menu-item. Am I screwed already? did they remove the option?
Do we have any info that you wont be able to disable web history after the change? Or delete it afterwards? That would seriously change my googling habits actually.
about a year ago when i closed my google account(s). same with facebook, although if their shadow-profiling is any indication of 'how its done' then you can expect google to start silently tracking the same inferential data about you as a person instead..
either may have started as amicable services, but both have rapidly evolved into a flagrant, unapologetic breeches of privacy.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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
So, which search provider do you trust?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Just tried to delete and found that I never have turned that feature on. So it seems that people concerned with privacy are not actually affected by this at all....
Of course, I use my Google account for the one project on Google Code I am involved in only, nothing else.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
We're all adults here...I'm pretty sure you can use fuck. The song sounds really stupid when you use the version with words replaced. :p
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
I never turned it on in the first place.
We're all adults here..
You must be new here.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Remind me as to why them retaining my search history would be detrimental to me?
Google can only associate your searches with your account if you're logged in. If you don't want them to remember your searches, don't log in. Log in to use YouTube when you want to, then log out when you're done.
I don't think that's true, Google *can* associate your searches with your account whether or not you are logged on. I don't know if they *do* associate searches with your account when you're not logged on, but there's no reason why they couldn't do it if they wanted to.
You'd have to delete all of your Google cookies to prevent this. And even then, it's no sure thing, they could look at your IP address and browser ID to do a pretty good job of correlating your activity with your Google account even without a cookie.
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 just logged into www.google.com/history and saw my browsing history back to 2007. I understand some of the privacy concerns, but I actually found it interesting to see what webpages I went to 5 years ago. For me, the ability to look back into details of the past that may have left my conscious memory recall seems to outweigh the security concerns. Also, on the www.google.com/history page you can delete individual record items so if there's something IN PARTICULAR that you want to delete... hint, hint, nudge, nudge, say no more.
But who has time to go through 5 years of browser history to delete all of the times they searched for "naked hot girls with donkeys"? If you think you have some particularly sensitive items in your history, the only way to make sure you get them all is to delete it all.
Use two separate browsers. You might even be able to find an extension for Firefox that allows you to sign into Youtube but doesn't have the other tabs be signed in when visiting Google (at least, I think this is possible). Privacy mode I know works like that in Opera ( so I could sign in under a private tab in Youtube and use Google under a normal tab and wouldn't be signed in), not tried it under Firefox.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Looks like you slashdotted the EFF. Site is down.
Facts have a liberal bias.
I've read a dozen different articles about this, and I still can't tell: If I have a YouTube account but I've never had a "Google account," does this affect me at all?
One article mentioned "57 services" run by Google, but nobody's listed them. How do I know that I don't have an account at a site (like YouTube) Google owns but doesn't explicitly brand? I'd practically forgotten that YouTube was Google's...
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
You obviously haven't read the fine-print in their new agreement. One of the updates is that GoogleCalendar is changing. Months always start on Thursdays from now on. And there will be 14 months per year. Google's moon-base is still working on speeding up the moon's revolution, but it should be ready [out of Beta] by the end of 2012.
Karma: NaN
You're either not an English native speaker, being intentionally pedantic, or trolling. I'm not sure which. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Idiomatically speaking, in English (and most languages I speak, actually), when you refer to next + day of week, you mean X day, next week. The same holds true for French, Spanish and German (at least, I don't speak other languages), and is a speech pattern that predates the discovery of the Americas. So no, it's not something that's endemic to the American South, it's something that you'd have to have been living under a rock to have never heard in the English language.
If it helps you sleep at night, consider it an ellipsis. Next Thursday = "Next week, Thursday". English is lazy like that. When you say it's happening on Thursday, the "next" you're looking for is implicit. Similarly, because it's implicit when you simply say "Thursday", its presence indicates that the phrase has a different meaning.
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
in English (and most languages I speak, actually), when you refer to next + day of week, you mean X day, next week.
So if it is Monday, "next Thursday" is 10 days away, and on Fridays "next Thursday" is 4 days away, not 11 !? Never heard that one.
Not to this native speaker (in Oz). I'd usually say "next Thursday" on a Thursday, to mean a week from now.
If you want to talk 10 days ahead, that is "a week from Sunday", or some people would say "Sunday week" for short. I have heard the "next Sunday" usage for that somewhere (immigrants?) but it is unusual and confusing.
Because its absolutely and obviously true.
I don't think a cookie that remembers the identity of the last Google Account user that was logged into a browser is a particularly reliable indicator of the identity of the current browser user on a machine that has multiple users.
Obviously, they could associate not-logged-in searches with a Google Account based on all kinds of criteria -- IP address, presence of a cookie, etc. They could even randomly associate non-logged in searches to an account.
But none of those methods actually reliably associate the searches of the not-logged-in Google Account user who is, in fact, performing the search with their Google Account.
First, being wrong in 1 in 6 cases is not merely "not foolproof", but its fairly inaccurate.
Second, what the radically unscientific test referred to actually demonstrated is that 84% of visits (not visitors) to a web site had browser characteristics that didn't exactly match a database of tested browser characteristics. It has no way of identifying whether those visits (whether the ones with unique browser characteristics or not) were from the same or different users as other visits.
That doesn't say anything at all about the utility of using those browser characteristics to identify users, since nothing in the test relates actual users to those visits or the associated browser characteristics. (One user can easily have many different sets of browser characteristics, and vice versa, without any impact on the results of that test in terms of the uniqueness in browser characteristics among visits to that EFF site.)
So, while the EFF may make a claim about the identifiability of users based on those results, the results themselves don't even remotely support any conclusion about users.
I left the states 14 years ago, and though I go back to visit occasionally, I'm not even in an ACTA nation! You have to love countries like Norway. While we have endless laws prohibiting just about anything, the 32 policemen in the country just can bother with anything less important than murder. Oh... when annual budget arrives for them, they rush out and arrest everyone they can as fast as they can. So, figure like 30 arrests in one night. The rest of the time, they hang out in down town Oslo making sure that the hookers are confined to the first place anyone sees when they visit Norway, kinda like a welcome mat. I think they take turns with who gets to keep the national theater area safe which is where all the rich girls in expensive dresses that barely cover their privates go to get munchies after getting plastered at night.
I love this place. The best part is, even if the most dishonest man were to stand on a building here screaming at the top of his lungs speaking his mind, it wouldn't matter. People here are mature enough to listen to what interests them and intelligent enough to ignore the nonsense for the most part.
Of course your hidden reference to what most people refer to as the current Orwellian state is nicely placed. Of course, I'm not quite sure that we're at the point where the technology is ready for the thought police concept. Maybe the search result police is the next best thing.
If you want Google to treat every service like a separate account, then create a separate account for every service. And learn to use incognito mode for porn and bomb-making and all the other stuff you don't want anyone to know about.
And for god's sake, stop whining about this, you fucking paranoid losers.