Monday, May 5, 2008

Google Web History

It turns out that Google saves all of one's search history at https://www.google.com/history/ . Google associates this with our GMail accounts, for those of us with GMail, so
  • The search history is explicitly tied to the person, and not anonymized.
  • We can delete it and "pause" it, which appears to be effectively an opt-out.
This is an opt-out service, not opt-in. How much of a violation of privacy is this "feature," collecting data unbeknownst to the user? That depends:
  • How does Google use it?
  • How good is Google's security?
  • How good is any given user's password security?

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