[conspire] Privacy on the Web: Google's Revised Policy: Last Day to Delete Your Search History

Don Marti dmarti at zgp.org
Sat Feb 25 14:05:30 PST 2012


begin Rick Moen quotation of Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 10:04:31AM -0800:

> You should note that Google takes measures to do tracking (or targeted
> marketing, as the concepts are related and poorly distinguishable) of
> both logged-in and not logged in users even if they have 'Web History' 
> disabled, so, if you don't care to have Google be able to correlate data
> from a lot of places, you shouldn't stop with mere disabling that one
> particularly egregious example.  (EFF's article notes the extent of
> default data-mining they do.)

My new favorite Firefox extension is Request Policy:
  https://www.requestpolicy.com/

It does the closest thing I've seen to correcting
an unfortunate misfeature in how web browsers handle
third-party images and scripts on pages.
  http://zgp.org/~dmarti/freedom/framing-privacy/

One other interesting piece of Google news is that
Google plans to honor "Do Not Track" headers sent
from the browser.
  http://zgp.org/~dmarti/www/google-you-know-me-down-with-dnt/

I'm not going to disable Request Policy any time soon,
but it's important to see that Google management is
starting to realize that ☞ increasing creepiness of
tracking does not correlate to increasing ad revenue ☜.

Bonus link -- Slade Cutter gives examples of the
creepiest practices here:
  http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/22/the-7-creep-factors-of-online-behavioral-advertising/

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org




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