Fogging your Google search history with Python and Reddit • Hacker News Board

Re: Fogging your Google search history with Python and Reddit

#51

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #47

nerdponx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that they never state they aren't still caching and selling your data. They just aren't showing you ads based on it.

Google isn't selling your data. They'd never do that. They make nearly all their money with advertising because they have so much good data to target ads. If they sold this data they'd lose their competitive advantage. It doesn't matter if Google is good or evil, selling user data to other companies would be a very bad business decision in both cases.

Good point. But selling it or using it in-house, they're still mining it for ad research.

Re: Fogging your Google search history with Python and Reddit

#52

Post by mi100hael » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

> If a story broke, I’d got to Fox news, CBS, Aljazeera, Politico– even fake news sites like The Onion or CNN.

Zing!

> Tkinter- I knew I’d have to enter my gmail username and password, and I didn’t want to hard code it knowing I was going to share my code.

For something like this that's intended to run forever or at an interval via cron or whatever, you're much better off pulling credentials from a config file or environment variables than requiring user interaction, especially via GUI.

Re: Fogging your Google search history with Python and Reddit

#53

Post by dr_zoidberg » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 3:27 PM UTC

goda90 wrote: post #25

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #19

As a simple rule, whenever I want to search something and minimize polution to my web history, I open the other browser I never use and then go into incognito mode. As a side note, this reminded me of the "Neo looks for Morpheus" scene (the one just before "Wake up Neo").

If I watch a Youtube video not logged in, in private browsing mode, in a different browser than where I am logged into Google, I end up seeing suggestions that are very much related to what I just watched when I use a logged in Youtube app on another device. And this is on a very shared Internet connection.

In my experience, YT suggests videos related to what I've been seeing with that "session", however I understand how this could be a YMMV situation.