Re: [IP] Google's Web Accelerator is a big privacy risk

David Farber writes:

From: Brian Carini Date: May 5, 2005 11:06:12 AM EDT To: David Farber Subject: Google's Web Accelerator is a big privacy risk Reply-To: brian@carini.org

I've said this before: I really like Google, but they are getting dangerous. Google has a great image as a good company. They have engendered a great amount of trust through their "Don't Be Evil" motto. And I think they really mean it. But the fact is that they are stockpiling a perilous amount of personal information about their users.

Already, Google logs every search request with its IP address. Google has acknowledged this log in a number of interviews. But, they have never answered why they keep such a log. The search log by itself is not too harmful since the IP address identifies a computer and not a person. The searches cannot easily be traced to a particular person without help from the ISP, unless a person likes to Google their own name frequently.

A bigger problem is that many Google search users are also Gmail users, and a cookie is shared between Gmail and Google search (because they use the same domain, google.com). Therefore, if a person uses Gmail and Google search from the same computer, even with a long period of time in between, Google will know the identity of the person responsible for those search queries. Google doesn't need to infer your identity from the content of your other web searches; it already knows it, if you're a Gmail user. This identification can be retroactive. If you used Google search for 3 years on a particular PC, and then signed up for a Gmail account, your search cookie from that PC would be sent to Google and the name you provided for your Gmail account could then be associated retroactively with your entire saved search history. Google cookies last as long as possible -- until 2038. If you've ever done a Google search on a given computer with a given web browser, you probably still have a descendant of the original PREF cookie that Google gave you upon your very first search, with the very same ID field (a globally unique 256-bit value). This problem is ubiquitous in the web portal industry, and Google is right to say that its privacy policy is better than many of its competitors'. However, Google is still assembling a treasure trove of personal information, possibly stretching back for years, that Google may release in response to any civil subpoena or "governmental request": http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/privacy.html#disclose -- Seth David Schoen | Very frankly, I am opposed to people http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | being programmed by others. http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/ | -- Fred Rogers (1928-2003), | 464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984) ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]