Google Search/Web history disable does nothing for privacy

http://jacquesmattheij.com/google-search-history-disable-does-nothing

by jacquesm • 12 years ago

116 87 12 years ago

whyleyc• 12 years ago

At what point will browsing via a VPN become the de-facto way of using the web ?

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

Never. People don't care of this level of privacy (except a very small minority). And frankly, thanks to the sophisticated data mining/statistical algorithms just using VPN only makes tracking/profiling harder, not impossible.

dueprocess• 12 years ago

This isn't an issue of privacy, it's an issue of deception. Privacy (or the control of privacy) is being insinuated, but it's only smoke and mirrors. It's a lie.

camus2• 12 years ago

They dont care now,but someday they will,trust me.They dont care now because they get all these freebies in exchange of all their data.These freebies aint going to be free forever.

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

At a guess, never. In fact, it will likely be the opposite, you'll be accessing the web through a device (mobile phone, tablet, thin client (aka ultrabook)) that you have bought at a steep discount from some provider in exchange for a large chunk of your privacy.

People (as in, the general public and a surprisingly large fraction of those that should know better) simply do not care.

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

that you have bought at a steep discount from some provider in exchange for a large chunk of your privacy.

I have some doubt that the consumer observes this discount.

If consumers insisted on privacy-by-default, the point of sale cost would not be very different. It's just the industry standard not to provide this.

If we observe a steep discount now, it's because privacy-by-default has become a specialist interest that manufacturers can therefore charge extra for.

chopin• 12 years ago

As per the OP what would this solve, exactly? You just would disguise your IP address, but cookies and any other identity revealing details of your browser will stay the same.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

When traffic shaping of typical protocols like HTTP[s] and a lack of net neutrality causes only unidentifiable VPN sessions to operate at a consistent high speed.

blauwbilgorgel• 12 years ago

You can try to combat a part of this by installing Ghostery. It will block a lot of these third-party requests. As a website owner you could link to the share page, instead of loading the widgets, or load the widgets only after the user requests them.

As for those server logs, I understand they record my movements, but I don't think it is my right to stop them from doing that. The one who owns the server/web property should be allowed to analyze requests to that server. This can get icky though in the case of major CDN's.

You could choose not to keep server logs as a search engine (forgoing DOS protection), but then what happens when a user clicks on an advertisement? Privacy seems only as strong as the weakest chain.

michaelx386• 12 years ago

Ghostery is an excellent piece of software but it caused me a few issues. For instance I logged in to my bank and couldn't view any statements. It was Ghostery blocking something so I whitelisted the site. Not a big issue but it took me some time to realise it wasn't a problem with my bank's website.

I went on to uninstall Ghostery because I was worried the unpredictable behaviour it introduces might cause some frustrating issues, particularly when going through a process like filling out a long online form only for it to fail at the end.

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

Not a big issue but it took me some time to realise it wasn't a problem with my bank's website.

Actually, it likely was. Your bank probably did not realize it but depended on some external component blocked by ghostery being loaded. I've seen the weirdest cases of this, such as one instance where a missing function in some javascript code was fixed for backwards compatibility in an ad-tag served by someone else...

So disabling the ad tag caused the site to fail with a javascript error.

In general, a banking website should work A-Ok with ads disabled and if it does not it is likely not Ghostery that is at fault but the bank (if only for not testing that their site works with ghostery or adblock installed).

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

Use EFF's Privacy Badger. Easier to deal with when problems appear.

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

therealunreal• 12 years ago

Give RefControl a try as well, it blocks the HTTP "referer".

leephillips• 12 years ago

You could use this little bookmarklet as well:

http://lee-phillips.org/norefBookmarklet/

cornholio• 12 years ago

I use a more radical step: browse in incognito mode all the time. No cookies survive a browser restart. If you have a fast connection, the cache is actually makes your browsing slower. As for the "convenience" of being logged in all the time on the sites I visit, I would rather not. Coupled with a dynamic IP, they can't correlate any of my traffic and search data.

bradyd• 12 years ago

Coupled with a dynamic IP

How dynamic is your IP really, though? My "dynamic" IP from Comcast will go unchanged for months or even years (I think the last time it changed was when I replaced my modem about a year and a half ago).

ds9• 12 years ago

Ghostery, the last time I checked it out was closed-source, subject to control or influence by advertisers, and reporting to the vendor about users' browsing. Clearly lots of people like it, but I would consider it gross breach of my security policy.

My recommendation for anyone who's serious about controlling his/her online footprint is Request Policy. It's open source and simply blocks requests according to user directions - you can put it on a whitelist or blacklist basis, and decide for yourself what servers to contact from each page. Of course this is too inconvenient for most people, but it gets asyptotically less troublesome as the list is perfected.

joosters• 12 years ago

Ghostery doesn't default to phoning home, last time I installed it.

bryans• 12 years ago

1. Closed-source javascript is not a thing, and Ghostery's code is very readable.

2. Technically, anything is subject to influence by third parties, but I'm quite certain you possess zero evidence that Ghostery is actually influenced by advertisers. Implying that Ghostery might do something nefarious at the behest of advertisers (based on nothing but personal paranoia) seems maliciously disinformational.

3. Ghostrank is opt-in by default. You have to intentionally check a box that plainly says you agree to send "anonymous statistical data" to them.

codesuela2• 12 years ago

FYI there is also Disconnect.me (Open Source see Github) and the EFF Privacy Badger (also Open Source)

gorhill• 12 years ago

That's one of the advantage of my extension, HTTP Switchboard [1], over many others out there: it shows you everywhere a web page tries to connect -- and then let you act on what you find. First step is being properly informed. It also shows you behind the scene connections (those from other extensions or the browser). Anything that goes through webRequest API is reported.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard

TomaszZielinski• 12 years ago

I disabled the history to make the attack surface smaller. Even if Google retains that data forever, if someone gains access to my account she won't be able to check my browsing history.

joesmo2• 12 years ago

Agreed. I think this is the biggest point missed by the article. Your privacy as far as Google is concerned may not improve, but your overall privacy will. It will be much harder for other parties to get to the data Google collected. Considering that other parties are much more harmful and can lead to real-world harm (death, imprisonment, etc.), I'd say turning off history absolutely increases privacy.

greenyoda• 12 years ago

"Considering that other parties are much more harmful and can lead to real-world harm (death, imprisonment, etc.), I'd say turning off history absolutely increases privacy."

Those guys who can imprison you can easily get your data directly from Google. If Google doesn't hand it over to them for the asking, they'll get a warrant (assuming there's probable cause to suspect you of a crime).

JohnDoe365• 12 years ago

Not using Googles nameservers and DuckDuckGo helps.

hwell3• 12 years ago

That isn't true. Google anonymizes logs after 9 months: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/another-step-to-prote...

Active web history on the other hand will still be associated with an account for as long as it's active (not solely to Google's benefit by the way).

I thought this stuff was already sorted years ago and is now common knowledge, it's like those people only now realizing that Gmail does contextual ad targeting, it's somehow disingenuous.

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

That isn't remotely true.

Well, you just linked to a text that more or less proves that it is true for at least 9 months.

That gives google 9 whole months to mine those logs for all they're worth, after which I'm sure they can be safely anonymized. 9 months is plenty.

Note that google does not say anywhere it won't store your web history derived from those logs, it just says it anonymizes the logs.

Little details like these matter a lot when reading privacy policies.

hwell3• 12 years ago

Of course they mine those longs, there is a lot of knowledge to be gleaned from them, mostly to improve their product. Also some places mandate some kind of data retention.

Deriving "history" from those logs doesn't matter much as long as they eventually get anonymized.

You should update your post to reflect the 9 month distinctions between search history and server logs.

thomasbachem2• 12 years ago

Don't forget: Google AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Hosted Libraries (jQuery etc.), Google Maps Embeds, Google DNS servers, ...

I'd bet Google can track you on ~80% of all websites.

Does anybody know of studies that analyze the reach of these direct/indirect tracking capabilities?

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

Hey Thomas!

Long time no see... what is it, 6 years or so? There's a blast from the past...

I totally forgot about DoubleClick and DNS, I'll update the post.

thomasbachem2• 12 years ago

Hey Jacques, I think it's even more than 7 years :). Reading a lot of your stuff, hope we'll meet again soon!

microtonal2• 12 years ago

These as startling statistics, roughly corresponding to the number in the linked blog post. Add to that that they can also probably analyse ~50% of meaningful e-mails (depending on the region) [1].

[1] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...

tonfa• 12 years ago

There would still be an effect:

[Google] would observe three specific types of data retention periods: deletion of the last byte of IP addresses in Google server logs (9 months); the validity of cookies placed in users’ browsers (2 years); anonymisation of the cookie number in the company’s server logs (18 months).

From http://www.cnil.fr/fileadmin/documents/en/D2013-420_Google_I... but it was stated publicly e.g. at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/09/google-cuts-server-log... or http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/another-step-to-prote...

zmmmmm• 12 years ago

I'm curious how the author knows that it "does nothing". It seems that the argument ends with "because they can" we can "rest assured" that it "is exactly what they’ll be doing". In other words, if you already have a certainty that Google is pure evil then you can extrapolate from that that they will do the most evil possible thing in every circumstance, including this one. That's not terribly profound. The entire rest of the post is a litany of ways by which Google can see your cookies, which has little to do with what they DO with that information, which is what the user account setting purports to affect.

(to be clear, I have no evidence either whether they continue to track and store web history or not, but it doesn't seem like the author does either, and it's disappointing to see such a baseless trashy post from someone who I have in rather high esteem in general).

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

Let's turn that around for a bit. The default assumption that I have is that advertising companies that deal in user profiles (such as Google) will collect everything they can about you because this benefits their ability to sell advertising. Google's terms of service states what they capture, in other words no matter what their user interface is telling you their privacy policy (which I consider to be the leading document in cases like these) tells a totally different story and and generalizes to all of google's services, including search (they even use that as the example of what they capture).

The fact that things like cookies are in those logs that they do make (again, according to the privacy policy) makes it trivial to re-construct the data that they ostensibly do not keep. If it is trivial, makes good business sense, enhances the value of the profile and makes more money then you can bet dollars to donuts that unless there are strong statements to the contrary from the company involved that they do not engage in such behaviour that they do.

Privacy policies are generally written in favour of the company writing them and it would be terribly naive to assume that if it could be written more strict but wasn't that this is an accident or oversight. Note how long google fought the EU commission to have any limits set on their permission to retain user data, and how they tried to spin it as a user benefit when they eventually caved in.

So if google re-writes their privacy police to state explicitly that they do not datamine their logs and that the data is used only in a statistical sense and never in a personally identifiable sense then I would agree with you (and I would even believe them), but until they do it is fairly safe to assume that they in fact do use that information.

Of course 'only to enhance your user experience' and never to improve the bottom line for google.

magicalist2• 12 years ago

That's really just begging the question again, though.

It's also not correct, as their privacy policy doesn't state that they always collect a cookie per log entry, for instance, but that they may. This is an important distinction, because in practice, at least things like doubleclick and analytics requests do not transmit your google account cookie. In a quick test, google fonts and google hosted libraries don't appear to send any cookies at all, though I don't know if that's true under all circumstances.

There's much you could reconstruct from IP addresses and connection patterns if you were sufficiently motivated, but that's a long way from extrapolating from their privacy policy. Regardless, assuming "they can, therefore they will" isn't nearly sufficient here.

CaptainZapp• 12 years ago

Why on earth was this comment down voted?

You lay out the reasoning for your blog post in a succinct and plausible fashion.

One is free to assume, of course, that you're a tinfoil wearing paranoiac and disagree with your reasoning, but down voting such a comment, into which you actually expend the effort to explain your reasoning just seems so wrong, infantile and dumb.

Another trend I unfortunately observed recently where comments around the line of: "Don't link to this (the this being a blog entry by Andrew Sullivan, which is hardly controversial) since [paraphrased] it does not reflect the dogma of the HN politburo.

It's crap like that, which really devalues HN and I think that's a shame.

wfjackson• 12 years ago

If it is trivial, makes good business sense, enhances the value of the profile and makes more money then you can bet dollars to donuts that unless there are strong statements to the contrary from the company involved that they do not engage in such behavior that they do.

Even strong statements don't help, as seen in the Google Apps for Education case where filings in federal court admitting scanning of GAE emails by Google were at odds with public statements denying it. It's an interesting read as it shows the confusing mess of privacy statements versus actual practice, and how hard it is even to figure out which privacy statement applies, as Google started claiming that the consumer privacy statement applied to free student email as well, but it wasn't clear earlier.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...

Google finally stopped the practice, and it seems they were scanning even Google Apps for Business emails to build profiles to show ads on other sites even if the show ads setting was off.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2014/04/google...

pessimizer• 12 years ago

if you already have a certainty that Google is pure evil

This is a straw man. Google may not think that doing something that is legal and common is evil, and why are we having theological discussions anyway?

You will have information on what Google is doing with your information when Google volunteers that information. Unless they deny usage in a legally binding sense, there's no reason why you should expect to see any further information about how that data is used internally. What you do know is:

1) that there will be no public relations consequence for breaking users' trust, because what they do with what their records is not transparent, and

2) that it's legal and common to use any information gathered about you in just about any way.

You can either assume they'll do what you have indicated that you prefer with the data, even if that likely involves leaving money on the table - or you can assume that they will generally do what they're legally obligated to do, and within that, attempt to maximize profits. IMO, the former position involves imagining that a company has a personality, and doesn't want to take advantage of you. It's a false equivalence to assert that the latter (a company legally maximizing its resources for profit) involves a similar leap of imagination.

You're not going to get information either way about what they DO until Google publicly obligates themselves with a policy document, or somebody leaks.

DanBC• 12 years ago

2) that it's legal and common to use any information gathered about you in just about any way.

That depends what jurisdiction you're in.

Law is what's on the books and how the regulators and courts interpret what's on the books.

It's possible Google's lawyers are saying that some process is compliant with law when the regulators and courts may have a different interpretation.

higherpurpose2• 12 years ago

It does nothing just like Google's own DNT option in Chrome does nothing to its own web properties. It's almost like Google is begging for this sort of stuff to turn into regulations against them, because clearly they can't be trusted to do the right thing.

dzhiurgis2• 12 years ago

How about browser phishing protection? Isn't that calling some sort of server to check the URL safety?

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

Technically it could be done using only a hash of the url, I'm not sure how it works in practice.

rockdoe• 12 years ago

That is how the Firefox implementation works. And the DB is local, the server is only checked on hits.

Matt_Cutts3• 12 years ago

That's exactly how Google does it. Please see http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/safebrow... .

Periodically, Chrome will download a list of hashed URLs believed to be dangerous. As you surf the web, Chrome checks client-side if the URL matches anything in the hashed list. Only if the hash matches will Chrome initiate a more in-depth check.

CurtMonash• 12 years ago

I use several browsers.

1. Most of what I do is on Firefox. NoScript is turned on, and disallows Google Analytics. I'm not signed into Google, although as this article points out, that changes little. I use CookieCuller aggressively. Ad/pop-up blocker are in play. Etc.

The net effect is to make web browsing less noxious than it otherwise might be -- few pop-ups, few adds, very few cases of some noisy video spontaneously playing when I click a link in Firefox.

2. My monash.com email has long gone through Google Apps. That's in Chrome. I also open links I get through email in Chrome, but do little else there. In that browser I'm usually signed into Google.

Chrome/Google consume a lot of resources, e.g by insisting on opening Google Talk whether I want it or not. But it's a manageable annoyance, as I keep my open-tab count in Chrome fairly low.

3. I use IE very selectively. If a page won't open in another browser, I try it there. A few of my most-annoying and rarely used apps and sites are relegated to IE -- Facebook, WebEx/GoToMeeting/etc., and perhaps a few others I'm not thinking of now. Unlike the other two browsers, IE is outright closed on my PC much more often than it's open.

r0h1n• 12 years ago

I follow many of the practices you list, and then some. I wish there was an easy way to people - especially lay users - to "subscribe" to a privacy-enabled version of Firefox. For instance they could be offered pre-selected choices: 1. Block analytics [x] 2. Destroy cookies after session [x] 3. Block scripts [x] 4. Prevent search results tracking [x]

I say this because few non-tech users know or care about the entire gamut of tracking-blocking services (beyond,say, AdBlock). But if they were presented with an option like this:

Do you want to install Firefox "clean" -or- Do you want to install Firefox "Shields Up"

Raphael• 12 years ago

Privacy Badger is an attempt at a single extension with default configuration. (It may even be possible to bundle with the browser.)

Karunamon• 12 years ago

I have to ask - was this truly a surprise for anyone?

Google's entire business is advertising. You'd be silly not to expect them to log, of all things, what you type in the search box.

Search history is and always has been a convenience feature, and they do not posture it as anything but this.

GUNHED_158• 12 years ago

1. Of course a certain level of logging and archiving of information is necessary to maintain the security of a server, it is not always about “THE USER”.

2. Again, a certain level of logging and archiving information is mandatory to offer some services based on artificial intelligence and to make people's life easier. Just imagine asking your doctor to not having a file of your information because it is a violation of your privacy! It does have a lot of benefit in terms of saving time, to learn about user’s search patterns. Google is able to offer better search results like this.

3. It does not make sense to be particularly concerned about what Google when you are actually sending that information out to the whole world. This is like shouting out something and then complain about people listening to it. If you don’t want people smell your kitchen, first you should think of closing the window.

rogcg• 12 years ago

Just use DuckDuckGo(http://www.duckduckgo.com).

microtonal2• 12 years ago

The point here is that you are tracked on website that you visit. No amount of DuckDuckGo will change that.

sanxiyn• 12 years ago

I have been blocking Google Analytics for a very long time now. It seemed no brainer to me. You may want to do the same.

alok-g• 12 years ago

I follow the practices listed in a few comments already [1] on PCs. But this has proven to be painful with increasing number of websites depending on Google via ajax.google.com, etc. As many as a third of the websites won't work on my browser till I take specific actions to allow something.

What are the recommendations for Android along these lines? Is rooting needed/recommended? I currently use Maxthon browser, have never signed into Google Account on my phone ever (this gives a lot of trouble, but sounded worth ever since I found my older Android phone won't let me remove Google Account ever without a factory reset).

I use Amazon's Appstore, which could be bringing its own privacy issues. I found that their Appstore app by default sends App usage data to them, though this can be disabled.

[1] Private browsing mode, NoScript, Ghostery, Self-Destructing Cookies, Blocked Google-Analytics, etc.

Matt_Cutts3• 12 years ago

Just a quick point. The article says "there is no guarantee whatsoever that google does anything except for changing what they display to you."

If you're on the page at https://history.google.com/history/ and click on the gear and then "Help" the page about deleting search history is at https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465 and it says

"What happens to your history when it's deleted

When you delete items from your Web History, they are no longer associated with your Google Account. However, Google may store searches in a separate logs system to prevent spam and abuse and to improve our services."

The article claims that there's no guarantee that Google does anything other than change the display. Google actually does quite a bit of work to disassociate items from your Google account if/when you delete them.

jacquesm19• 12 years ago

Storing searches in a log to prevent spam sounds pretty disingenuous.

So, how about an unambiguous (as in, without weaselwords such as 'may') update to the privacy policy detailing exactly what google stores in a user profile and what it does not, and that what a user sees in the interface mirrors exactly what google sees in its systems minus some small delta for propagation across google's servers?

Because what you write above is technically quite possibly true as far as the viewpoint of a user is concerned but leaves open a ton of possibilities for clever/creative interpretation on what 'improve our services' means.

moultano2• 12 years ago

What sort of harm are you worried about that this doesn't exclude?

Matt_Cutts3• 12 years ago

Why disingenuous? An easy example of preventing spam would be to detect and stop people trying to spam Google Suggest, which is based on queries that users do.

Jacques, you wrote an article titled "Google Web/Search History Disable Does Absolutely Nothing." I just wanted to point interested people to Google's public documentation which points out what happens when people delete items from their search history.

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

What you have said is unconvincing, and gives you quite a lot of wiggle room.

by "association with your Google Account", do you include "association with your personal identity"? The description of the server log suggests that your web history will still be easily connected to your personal identity. The claim that Google is doing quite a bit of work to prevent that wouldn't match the privacy policy.

by "deleted from Web History", do you include "turned off Web History"? This seems possible but is not explicitly stated.

The article says "there is no guarantee whatsoever" and I believe this is no guarantee whatsoever that there is more than a superficial difference.

woopdy• 12 years ago

Aww, mine was OFF the whole time...

Google Search/Web history disable does nothing for privacy

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