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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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.