Big brother or user customization?
In a time when more and more person talk about Google Big Brother posture, new examples of their constant supervision of our actions pop up frequently. There are several webpages I prefer to search on google each time instead of bookmarking them. It may look counter-productive, but it is actually quicker, since those sites are the first search result. One of them is the Google analytics website. Today, however, my search had something new on it:
We all knew that Google saves all the information about our searches, but for some reason, the fact that they even displayed it to me, frightened me a bit, not because of my searches, but because of all the other information that we, sooner or later, exchange in an email, like banking, confidential, login credentials, etc…
I must say that I’m facilitating this task to Goole, as I use Firefox’s GMail notifier plugin, that keeps me logged in all time, giving Google everything it needs to trace all my steps… One must decide whether to surrender to the inevitable or to delay it with counter measures…
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September 25th, 2007 at 5:36 am
Wow, I didn’t know of that new “feature”… And yes, it also scares me a little bit…
September 25th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Google has a post about it, explaining how they use it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/search-privacy-and-personalized-search.html
They explain the user benefits… If they do anything else with the data, I don’t know.
Basically, you can Pause it in your account settings (the “Web History” service), or you can use google without logging in, which is probably the safest way if you are paranoid and don’t believe the pause option actually does anything.
September 25th, 2007 at 7:31 am
@Karma_Police: I DO believe that the pause option only stops displaying it to you and data keeps being collected. Personal data collection is not exclusive to Google. Google just makes use of it better than the others, and makes us aware of it, what, to a certain extent, scares me a bit, because things are obviously moving towards a complete monitoring of our web life. It is not just Google’s actions that scare me a bit, but the fact that we are very close to complete monitoring of our actions. Imagine all the sites you visit that are using Google Analytics… Google know who you are and where you are
September 26th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
[...] Many are the cybernauts currently putting Google on a hold, suspecting a Big-Brother-like conspiracy. [...]