Remove Google Search History Before New Privacy Policy Takes Effect

> Google is not 2 people watching me sleep, shower, drive, date, make love, etc.

its irrelevant how many people is watching you, but Google will watch you as much as technology and law (sometimes bent to maximum) lets them. Like you stated you value responses, but it doesnt get the rocket science to know humans are unique enough that one search to one person is irrelevant to another. Hence, search needs to be customized. If they could turn your security camera on, they would watch you sleeping. You can learn plenty from the act alone: having problems sleeping, snoring, moving your legs (whatever the symptom is called), waking up too early/too late -- al this information is gold to Google. Your driving behavior is important to insurance companies. Your dating life is important to dating websites - if you are single you are worth money to them. Otherwise they dont care. Making love is important too -- can you handle the ride, are you an impotent, do you like wearing kinky clothes, etc etc. This is all GOLD to google. Now, they may not throw at you Viagra pills when you search for steakhouse in New York but if they AdNetwork goes to other website they may, in their discretionary, use information gathered about you to serve better ads and get better click-through.

> It is software that stores and analyzes data that I choose to send to it. but you not always aware you sending, sometimes knowing what you "sending", you wouldnt!

> The Abstruse Goose comic is much more applicable to pervasive government surveillance. whats the difference if Google has to abide by the laws of the country they do business? They can sometime deny response to govnt subpoena your searches, but I say more and more they just comply. I dont think number of gov inquiries will go down. I dont think % of denials by Google will go up.

> I think if people spent as much time focusing their attention elected officials as they spend on hand-wringing about Google, we'd probably have better laws. how is this relevant to the subject or your comment at all?

"You can delete information from Web History using the remove feature, and it will be removed from the service. However, as is common practice in the industry, and as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users."

This refers you to the main privacy policy, which says very clearly that Google stores every request you make along with cookies that uniquely identify your account.

http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

Web History is an add-on tracking system. Google does not permit opting-out of Google's regular tracking system, which at one point stored every request you had ever made to any Google server, but which I think now may be semi-anonymized after a couple of years, if I remember their changing policies correctly. Although, the Privacy Policy makes no such promise, so perhaps they do still keep every request ever made in Google's existence. Google absolutely has a perfect record of every interaction you've had with them for the past year or two. Even if Web History is "off".

I also found this link http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/tutorials/x-xulintro/ after a little searching. I'll try it out.

Generally, if you're not in the US (and I'm assuming that's what you mean, not that you're disenfranchised but live in the US), then Google and other US companies have an obligation to comply with the laws of your country, assuming their terms of service allow use in your nation.

Ultimately, you have a choice to use or not use a service. The Company offering it has an obligation to disclose what information is collected and how it's used, and you also have to make an assessment of their ability to protect that data from misuse either internally or by external parties. We make these decisions all the time both online and offline.

I think it's fine for folks to opt out of using a service like Google if they no longer agree with the privacy policy. I don't think it's appropriate to villanize any company for good-faith efforts to update their privacy disclosure over time as long as you can opt out of those changes and erase your data. And I think we have to be realistic and expect that for 95% of users, they're not going to opt out.