Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote:
On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 23:16 +0000, B.L. Krieger wrote:
sure. maybe i am just paranoid, but for some reason i have the impresion
that google would aggregate (or at least collect) the data it gets of a
particular ip address whether i am signed in to one of their services or
not, or whether me or my girlfriend/brother/colleague/etc. is signed in
(maybe even more interesting). am i the only one believing this? it is
certainly if you consistently sign in with a particular account to
google from the same ip address, it could keep an association between
that account and that ip address for all searches and other activity
even when you're not signed in. so, of course, can any other website of
any sort that includes some sort of login functionality. any server that
is called across multiple websites can track your activity across them,
traditionally with cookies, but also quite easily without them simply
through ip address association. (ok, for the paranoid, a couple of the
biggest services that are called across multiple websites are owned by
google - adsense and doubleclick - but there are others google doesn't
own, too).
sure. i am aware of this. i was just briefly puzzled how my email
address got all mingledin. guess we will have to hope that jap and tor
and similar services will be more usable in the future.
as we discussed last month, about browser plugins, every plugin
potentially knows every single thing you do with your web browser. some
plugins may use this knowledge in a way that makes it obvious to the
user that they are using this knowledge. if they want not to be
uninstalled, they should do this in a way that seems useful rather than
creepy.
i was not aware of having installed a plugin. actually i doubt that i had.
but what about all the plugins that _don't_ make it obvious to the user
(or, what about all the websites that don't attempt to make it obvious
to the user that they're tracking user activity - like google does?)
all these websites or plugins could be tracking you. indeed, if user
behaviour indicates that users opt out of services/sites/plugins that
make such behaviour obvious, the really creepy would just do this
silently...
google's only showing the privacy infringements that are possible. it's
not the only infringer out there, though!
-rishab
