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Google Personalizes Search Results Even When You're Logged Out, a DuckDuckGo Study Finds (theverge.com)
According to a new study conducted by Google competitor DuckDuckGo, it does not seem possible to avoid personalization when using Google search, even by logging out of your Google account and using the private browsing "incognito" mode. From a report: DuckDuckGo conducted the study in June of this year, at the height of the US midterm election season. It did so with the ostensible goal of confirming whether Google's search results exacerbate ideological bubbles by feeding you only information you've signaled you want to consume via past behavior and the data collected about you. It's not clear whether that question can be reliably answered with these findings, and it's also obvious DuckDuckGo is a biased source with something to gain by pointing out how flawed Google's approach may be. But the study's findings are nonetheless interesting because they highlight just how much variance there are in Google search results, even when controlling for factors like location.
you have the be the list observant person on earth not to see this?
That is, unless you're in the top 10%.
Obvious solution: When you need to buy drugs, hire an assassin, or process your bitcoin payment from the Russian FSB, just use someone else's computer. I use my cubie-mate's while he is taking a toilet break.
Another option is to use the terminals at the public library. Just watch out for the security cameras.
If they're not basing it on cookies, are they using browser fingerprinting?
Or does everyone using the same IP address get the same personalization?
My observation: In recent years, Google has been, more and more, poorly managed.
I use VPN, TOR, encrypted DNS, spoof my user agent, spoof my palette/canvas, wipe my cache every 20 minutes and don't accept most cookies. Unless they've got actual beacons in the browser I don't see how they would...
Everyone's watching, listening, and logging all the time. It's creepy. .. anywhere, ever.
The weirdest example to date: Just this Saturday, I came across a meme on the Memedroid app on my tablet, about a nerdy hoodie that looks like knight's armor. Some comments were pro, some con. I moved on to the next meme.
An hour later, I went downstairs, on my PC, check in on Facebook.. guess what an ad for shows up. That hoodie.. that I had never seen before that meme, and certainly never searched for
WTF? I have FB installed on the tablet but it wasn't actively running. That shit is spooky. Neither that meme nor in the comments for it was a link, it was just a picture of the stupid thing, and a joke. AI ?
I cannot bring myself to believe that was pure coincidence. It's one example of many, but just the most egregious.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I've never had a Google account, and I haven't accepted Google cookies in about 5 years. I wonder if I get the default results.
... yet I get personalized results. It is kind of freaky...
but that is what you want to see, why go to the length of finding out what is great for you by yourself, let someone else tell you what is great for you!
I knew that for at least a year, just from experience. I thought it was common knowledge.
-- Cheers!
I've never had a Google account, and I haven't accepted Google cookies in about 5 years. I wonder if I get the default results.
I would be astonished if you did. The whole point of this is that you're still being tracked even if you log out or use browser modes which don't send prior-established cookies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"You should check the GOOG chart on NASDAQ."
Yes, but what will be the long-term results?
Except for my email (which runs on a browser in a virtual machine), I browse completely in incognito mode. I notice searches start to become biased depending on what else I've searched for or browsed in that tab. The fact that the suggested search terms (which pop up as you type in your search request) seemed to "know" what I was browsing recently was a pretty big clue what was going on. Closing the tab and running the search again in a new tab clears this up and reverts the search to its default (which sometimes means different search results compared to the old tab)
DDG finds its competitor does scary things.
This is a smear campaign, it's kind of funny how unquestioning people are about something that affirms already-held beliefs.
Just saying... The Internet is the greatest mass publishing and communication platform in the history of mankind. And I think it is mostly now made of cat videos and creepy companies and creepy governments stalking people.
I seem to remember that google has always for the longest time now explicitly personalized results for everyone, even for people without an account.
So that would mean that if you do have an account, you will still get personalized results.
Seems to make perfect logical sense.
Common, google knows your IP and when you go into incognito mode you expect it to ignore you. Unless there is some sort of physical/tech limitation you can't expect Google to obey laws or adhere to ethics or decency, they just blame it on the algorithm. Do not track/robots.txt my ..
Second, search results can change by location, such as the inclusion of local news articles. We controlled for this factor by checking all links by hand for this possibility, comparing them to the city and state of the volunteer. We saw very few local links for gun control (1 organic link, 1 news infobox link) and immigration (0), though more for vaccinations (15 organic links, 4 news infobox links).
To control for these local links, we replaced all of them with the same placeholder — localdomain.com for organic links and "Local Source" for infoboxes — in all of our analysis. This adjustment means two users whose results only differed by a different local domain in the same slot would not count as different. Interestingly, this adjustment didn't affect overall variation significantly.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really control for location, because the targeting doesn't work the way they think it does. Google doesn't just include local news stories, but, even for (especially for?) logged out users, they apply targeting based on what your local demographics are like and the search history results of your neighbors. Live in a big city? Even if you're logged out, you'll get a different set of results than if you live in a small rural town. This is true even with a completely wiped history or brand new computer. The justification is that you probably have many similarities with people around you... if they're all searching for snow blowers because there's a storm coming, you probably are interested in one too. It's not even close to 100% accurate, but it's not inaccurate either - it's the same basis used for decades for selecting markets for television commercials, too: using a small group of consumers for whom they have highly accurate information, they extrapolate out to the larger market.
Does this mean you're not really logged out, and Google is secretly tracking you? No, no more than you're being tracked when some broadcaster decides to show certain commercials during a sitcom as opposed to others. They're just making an educated case, and while the result looks the same - pseudo-personalized content - the process is different.
Online news sucks specifically because it is excessively tailored for you.
One of the lost pleasures of 50 years ago is reading the paper; modern papers are ghosts of their former selves. A newspaper was a carefully curated collection of informative articles designed to appeal to a broad variety of people in a geographic area. Yes, they had ideological focuses, but narrow that focus too far and circulation would drop. Because newspapers desired the largest possible audience within a restricted geographic area, items in them had to stand up to critical scrutiny from a number of points of view.
Since there were no smartphones, when you had a little down time you'd read a bit further into the paper until you were scraping the bottom of the barrel. I'd start with the front page, go to the science section and work my way down until I was reading the sports page. And when you finished reading you'd be just a tiny bit different than when you started, because you'd been exposed to unfamiliar issues and viewpoints.
That feeling of having your mind expanded is what I miss. You can spend a few hours reading online news but when you're done you won't be any different than when you started. While you're reading you may be entertained, provoked, and pandered to, but in the end the algorithm isn't there to inform you. It's there to pigeonhole you so you can be bundled for sale.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Seriously you needed a study to see this?
Even YouTube tracks the kinds of videos you like to watch when you're logged out.
But oh my my surprise surprise, Chrome does a better job of it than any other browser.
C'mon guys, pay attention.
The first thing that Google does is assign you a customerID in JSON format in it's advertiser .JS package that is loaded for every website that uses Google statistics/advertising, which is EVERY website.
It uses that customerID to figure out exactly who you are by cookies left on your computer. You sign out of your account, those cookies are still on your computer connected to your google account.
If you have never used a specific computer and never logged in to your Google account from that computer you will get a generic customerID until Google can associate your browsing activity to a specific customerID assigned to your google account. Once the algorithm is 95% or greater positive it has the correct person, your customerID will change to the one assigned to your google account and the old customerID will become a sub-account.
But make no mistake. Google follows you and associates everything you do to you. There is no getting around hiding from google. If you do end up blocking google from getting an advertiser ID, most webpages will fail to load.
I don't understand why anyone finds this surprising. They have been doing this since day 1.
yet another article about what everyone knew months/years ago.
get with the times people.
I have people I know who LIKE walking out of a restaurant and being asked to fill out a survey. They buy into the tracking / convenience BS. I don't understand it at all, it would drive me nuts. But honestly I don't see it very often at all. Here is my setup:
1. Home PC I run Linux (Devuan), and use PaleMoon. Yes, I use google as my search, but I am not logged into my google account on my PC.
2. Android phone, logged into my google account, and I get my gmail there. I only use that email for "official" type things. I check personal email accounts via my phone on occasion using k9mail. I use Dolphin for the browser. Other than whatsapp and texting, I don't do a whole lot on my phone. I use google maps mainly for traffic. My location is turned off unless I need to turn it on, then it goes right back off. I sync pictures and things via SyncMe to my home PC, I don't use google services.
3. I don't use facebook at all. I still have an instagram account, but deleted the app from my phone years ago (when the logo was still brown). I only check in on the few people I follow via my browser on my PC.
4. My personal email is at my own domain, where I can create throw-away email accounts if I need to. I pull all my emails to my local account using fetchmail. I don't get very much spam anymore at all. And I use alpine to read my email, so that helps to lower the risk of clickbait/phishing.
Am I still being tracked? You bet. But I refuse to voluntarily give up all of my information constantly, based on the principle of it and because there is no real benefit in doing so. It's all an invented, perceived convenience.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It's not clear whether that question can be reliably answered with these findings, and it's also obvious DuckDuckGo is a biased source with something to gain by pointing out how flawed Google's approach may be.
Thanks for being open to criticism and openly acknowledging faults/bias.
would give a easy clue. I imagine your entire house network is on the same IP address to the outside world. Even IPv6 would have the same primary address.
I have no Gmail account. I have no Facebook account.
1) Once, I Google-searched some work-related part using my work desktop PC, and that night, back before I blocked ads on all my machines, an ad for that part showed up on my home machine even though I didn't do the same search at home.
2) I once looked unsuccessfully for third-party ink cartridge refills for my 20+ year old Epson inkjet printer, since Epson stopped making them. A couple of days later, I got an expensive, glossy, multi-page ad in snail mail from Epson touting their printer(s). I'd consider it a wild coincidence were it not for the fact that I typically get almost zero junk mail.
Time for a new search company. One with respect for laws.
The DuckDuckGo owner goes around *constantly* bashing Google, sometimes dishonestly, in every single interview he gives. I mean *every* interview. There's no such thing as DuckDuckGo doing a "study" of Google.
A few days ago I googled something about memory latency. It's not a topic I usually look up, but I did because somebody asked me about it. The following time I opened youtube, the first row of suggested videos contained a video explaining memory timing and latency. The video is more than a year old and not from a channel I watch frequently meaning my only explanation is the single, yet most recent search on google.com.
My computer has never been logged into either google or youtube, yet they obviously track me cross site despite a bunch of plugins like ublock origin and noscript.
What surprises me the most about this news is that it's news. It's far from the first time I noticed it and it's rather obvious when something like that happens.
If you make the same Google search for something more than once, there is a chance the results will be different. Time passes. New things get indexed. Caches expire. Google is fault tolerant / redundant. Some of those provisions might make your result different. Maybe a server is temporarily down, so its neighbors get used instead and you miss 1 result in N that makes it to the first page of results. Maybe your request routes to a different country or different cell than before, and that index state is different.
What they are observing is more likely the behavior of cached results to queries to protect the back ends than it is a browser setting or any attempt at personalization. I'm a software engineer at Google, and that's about the level of detail that I can disclose on this matter.
Incognito mode just guaranteed Google won't spy on you. It doesn't mean the web site isn't sending what you click on and your IP to an advertising preferences database (Google, Amazon, facebook), and Google is smarmy because their own sites do this even though you are in incognito mode and they know it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The fact that different people got different results when logged out doesn't prove that Google personalizes the results. Heck, Google could just be slightly randomizing the results to _prevent_ bubbles and the study would have come to the same conclusions. At the population level it's good to have different results and I'd be much more worried if Google would provide the exact same results for everybody, because those results are guaranteed to be biased in one way or another.
There are N million results for "gun control" and DuckDuckGo knows what the "correct", unbiased order is for the whole population?
If they find that over the duration of a month the same users keep getting the same results as previously night after night, then we can talk about personalization.
Please add an option to turn all the localizing and personalizing off.
Because when I search for science or research or math, I want the best results from the finest minds in the world.
Not what some third rater at the local university is doing.
Math is universal, global, timeless, abstract. It does not have a location.
Thank you.
I noticed that Boolean commands seem to have little effect of Google searches. They used to. That to me is more important that simply search results taylored to some vitual version of me.
DuckDuckGo uses cookies to remember your settings as well .... can be turned off or set to session only ...