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Google and Your Privacy
- Google's immortal cookie:
Google
was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038.
This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from
using persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and
immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines;
Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them.
This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime
you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't
already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique
ID number.
- Google records everything they can:
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address,
the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration.
Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number.
This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based
on geolocation.
- Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that
they are able to easily access all the user information they collect
and save.
- Google won't say why they need this data:
Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored.
When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin
about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information,
he had no comment.
- Google hires spooks:
Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National
Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security
clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to
the spooks in Washington.
- Google's toolbar is spy ware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for
Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads
your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's
only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar
did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain
this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly,
and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed,
Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every
time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software
vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version.
But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents
a massive security risk.
- Google's cache copy is illegal:
Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S.
copyright laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to
be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site
cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the
header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but
webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material
from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages
live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in"
for webmasters, not "opt-out."
- Google is not your friend:
By now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals
to most websites. Webmasters cannot avoid seeking Google's approval
these days, assuming they want to increase traffic to their site.
If they try to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses
in Google's semi-secret algorithms, they may find themselves penalized
by Google, and their traffic disappears. There are no detailed,
published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process
for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Many
a times the webmasters don’t even receive their answers
from google.
- Google is a privacy time bomb:
With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S.,
Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those
newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only
dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already
achieved.
Comments
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