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Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

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Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#141

Post by itistoday »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #135
andrewljohnson wrote: post #132

There is a rash of this kind of marketing I see cropping up on Hacker News, marketing which promotes one company while badmouthing another. We saw it from Posterous, Adioso, and now DuckDuckGo. * Adioso vs. Bing: http://blog.adioso.com/sorry-bing-adioso-is-still-the-worlds... * Posterous vs. Tumblr (and others): http://blog.posterous.com/hey-tumblr-users-got-comments-want... Setting aside whether or not you want to b…

I'm obviously biased, but I thought about this a lot before doing this page. First off, I tried to take the informative approach, not the badmouthing approach. In fact, this is the most informative page about search privacy I know about. You may reasonably disagree I got there, but that was indeed the goal. Second, for most people, Google is search. So not talking about them in the context of search is almost useless…

IHMO this is classy, smart marketing on your part. And it happens to be championing privacy concerns. More power to you.

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#142

Post by TheAmazingIdiot »

LordLandon wrote: post #122
TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate ads. I despise them. And I work as a small-time consultant along with my studies. When I install/fix a machine, I always load Firefox with adblock plus due to the amount of harassing nasty ads. Being the location where I do the majority of my business, they are almost exclusively on dialup, so even a 100kb image add is literally 25 seconds extra load time. Now, am I anti-capitalist? Not quite. I agree that som…

I do not want myself distracted from material that has no bearing on what I am looking at. Just to play devil's advocate, but wouldn't targetted ads be more preferable then, since they WOULD have a bearing on what you're looking at?

I'm all for targeted ads, when I am looking for products and/or services to buy.

99% of the time im on the internet, I am NOT going to buy stuff. I'm going to forums that I attend, getting email, working to help that ubuntu works better (by bug reports and fixes), and researching on more stuff that I can do in IT

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#143

Post by Matt_Cutts »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #74
16s wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will they make money? I agree with you. I like privacy, but ad supported search seems to be the only viable business model. Advertisers won't pay DDG b/c there's no one to target.

I assume they have various methods. One of the methods I noticed by accident was that they add their affiliate id to Amazon links in search results

I missed that until now--interesting. Is DDG an affiliate of any other websites?

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#144

Post by Matt_Cutts »

eddieplan9 wrote: post #86

Kudos to DDG. Finally a good alternative to the big G. What scares me the most sometimes is when I think about how ubiquitous Google's ads network and analytics network are. Most of the websites I visit use AdSense and/or Google Analytics. Some are using Google's copy of popular javascript libraries like jQuery. This means that when you are moving from site A to site B to site C, there is a good chance that even thou…

"I am not saying that Google is actually doing it, but it is scary someone has the capability to do it"

Uh, eddieplan9, you know that ISPs not only have this data but also your identity? Or that some ISPs sell that data to metrics companies? Here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/03/isps_selling_cl/

It's always strange to me that people worry about Google, when ISPs have a superset of the data that Google sees, plus your identity.

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#146

Post by cletus »

dschobel wrote: post #131
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, nothing that I've ever come across says you have to save and store peoples' personal information. If you have it, then you have to abide for legal requests for it, but if you don't have it, you don't have it.

As a caveat, I remember some techno-illiterate judge ruling that having the data in memory constituted a record with the implication that by not persisting the record/document you were intentionally destroying it. I'll try to find the link. edit: found it A federal judge in Los Angeles last week ruled (PDF) that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be tu…

This case was appealed in 2009. The Ninth Circuit did not directly address the issue but, reading this summary, it appears the district court's ruling wasn't quite as shocking as the headlines portrayed.

See http://lctjournal.washington.edu/vol5/a23Hall.html

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#148

Post by tiles »

axod wrote: post #113
extension wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person can't decide if they care about it until they understand it. Until they do, I'm glad people like Gabriel are being paranoid on their behalf.

Reminds me of stallmans endless ranting about freedom and software. The evidence is that the masses don't care. They just want stuff that works and solves problems for them. Is it open source? Why would anyone (apart from a geek) care?

And yet Stallman's endless ranting was instrumental in getting the Open Source movement started, and developing the GNU tools which brought us Linux, which is used widely in embedded systems and on servers, as well as by small businesses to cheaply bring users applications that solve problems for them. Sometimes solving problems for developers does trickle down.

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#149

Post by tiles »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #136
dpapathanasiou wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be better just to talk about how great privacy is at DuckDuckGo, perhaps in comparison to other search engines in general. Except there are no other search engines, in practical terms.

So why actually say Google? People will just get it, without having to single out a company. Let them make the leap.

There's the anecdote that some portion of casual Windows users don't know what an "Internet browser" is, they just click the little blue "e" on the desktop. Google is a brand name they'll associate with searching. Was it wrong for Firefox to target IE when there were other browsers which potentially had security concerns?

Re: Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

#150

Post by [deleted] »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #39
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #35

The first sentence when I stripped out the pictures was "When you search Google, and click on a link, your search term is sent to that site, along with your browser & computer info, which can often uniquely identify you." Referrers are a part of the way the web has worked since before Google existed. They're a browser-level feature more than something related to specific websites. But if referrers bother you, just us…

The referrer header is indeed a reality of HTTP, but that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't work around that reality and correct for it, if it has real privacy implications, which I think it definitely does. By getting rid of that header I think we take away a lot of private context, i.e. the actual search terms that landed you on that page, which in and of themselves can provide a lot of background into what was p…

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