More anonymous search by Google
Increasing concerns about the security of data gathered from users on the Web have recently determined Google to modify their privacy policy, allowing you to become anonymous after 18-24 months. Peter Fleischer, Privacy Counsel-Europe, and Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel have posted on Google’s official blog the new amendments, which specifically mention that “Unless we’re legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time.” Every time you use Google’s search engine, personal information about you is kept on Google’s servers, including your IP address, your search query and some cookie details.
Google retained that data about you for as long as it was necessary or useful. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google’s services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.” Last year, AOL- where Google holds approximately 5% in shares- suffered an accidental privacy breach that revealed data about searches made by 658,000 AOL members between March and May 2006. Apparently, without authorization, a staff member from AOL posted on the Internet millions of search words used during the three month period, in an attempt to offer the research community the possibility to create better tools for search engines, by studying the patterns present in the data offered about AOL clients. If I think about it a bit, I still find these 24 months as an extremely long period of time. The idea that someone can view all search logs from my IP address and detailly determine my behaviour from them is little scary…
Source: Google blog, Playfuls
http://data.aolsearchlogs.com
I imagine this is the same as Google look through.
Oh, only 18-24 months!??! Geez. I don’t nearly as much about someone knowing what I searched for 18-24 months ago as what I searched for yesterday. To me, this is very uneventful and scares me a bit more than I was to know that Google keeps personally identifiable information even 18-24 months (I had previously assumed surely they would wipe it sooner than that).
Don’t use Google directly. Do your searches through http://www.scroogle.org. Scroogle allows searches with your choice of Google or other popular search engines. The difference is, Scroogle strips all your identifying information out of the query before it hits the Google servers.
Scroogle maintains no user records and deletes all search logs within 24 to 48 hours.
I use Scroogle as my homepage because they don’t check where you go when you leave there or where you are coming from when you enter.
http://www.ixquick.com delete their log files within 48 hours
http://blackboxsearch.com/ even better
So what if they keep logs of the searches? What can they do with them? I bet this site keeps logs of ip’s that access it, and I am absolutely sure they keep emails too if you make a comment, but this doesn’t mean they could harm someone or do other things than improve their services based on the information available for research… Or would they? Emails can be sold to those fuckers who send spams each day….:)
@AlexC; you don’t get it, it’s not what google does to them but what other sources can do with all that info.