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Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#21

Post by remosi »

shard972 wrote: post #20
gizmo686 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could Google possibly do with people telling them every website they are visiting? Also, at the scale Google operates, I am not sure that DNS is that big of a resource commitment, and it may allow them to do fancy traffic routing stuff for their own services.

They could use it to build more accurate profiles of their users in order to monetize them.

> We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services.

-- https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#22

Post by krick »

phaer wrote: post #19
krick wrote: post #14

Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known to be) monetizable and what isn't.

I guess, for Google at least, getting all DNS requests of their users is worth paying for a popular DNS server. That's how they know which sites your like even if those sites don't use Google Analytics.

Wow, that's really good idea. So obvious after you said it, but I absolutely didn't think of it!

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#24

Post by krick »

gizmo686 wrote: post #17
krick wrote: post #14

Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known to be) monetizable and what isn't.

What could Google possibly do with people telling them every website they are visiting? Also, at the scale Google operates, I am not sure that DNS is that big of a resource commitment, and it may allow them to do fancy traffic routing stuff for their own services.

I have no idea, that's why I'm asking. And as you can see there turn out to be some pretty good answers to that already.

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#25

Post by krick »

remosi wrote: post #21
shard972 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could use it to build more accurate profiles of their users in order to monetize them.

> We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services. -- https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Interesting. I tend to believe it for some reason, although I don't know why myself. Does somebody really check if such promises are true? Are they trustworthy? It reminds me, that case with collecting wifi traffic — how did it get revealed at all?

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#26

Post by remosi »

krick wrote: post #25
remosi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services. -- https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Interesting. I tend to believe it for some reason, although I don't know why myself. Does somebody really check if such promises are true? Are they trustworthy? It reminds me, that case with collecting wifi traffic — how did it get revealed at all?

Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

-- http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/wifi-data-collectio...

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#27

Post by yoelp »

krick wrote: post #14

Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known to be) monetizable and what isn't.

>We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.

This may actually be true, as google believe's that if you arrive faster to a website after searching on Google you will use Google more

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#28

Post by scoot »

samstave wrote: post #6

I thought Google's core product was allowing "ping -t google.com" ICMP traffic to be the central monitor of my network connectivity and latency to the internet. Heck, I even have it aliased as "pg" on all my systems.

Time was, that was Sun's core product...

Re: Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

#30

Post by wdr1 »

cmelbye wrote: post #16
krick wrote: post #14

Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known to be) monetizable and what isn't.

Sure, they benefit by getting valuable data on Internet traffic. For another example of DNS server monetization, see http://opendns.com/ . Turns out there are clever ways of (mis)using DNS features to make money. For example, your server could hijack NXDOMAIN responses and instead direct the user to a nice page that tells them that the name couldn't be resolved alongside a couple relevant advertisements.

NXDOMAIN hijacking is what OpenDNS does.
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