Google Expands Tracking to Logged Out Users
December 6th, 2009Via: Tech Radar:
Anyone who’s a regular Google search user will know that the only way to avoid the company tracking your online activities is to log out of Gmail or whatever Google account you use. Not any more.
As of last Friday, even searchers who aren’t logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a ‘better service’.
Anonymous cookie
The company explained: “What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.”
However, if you’ve previously been a fan of the log-out method to avoid being tracked, there’s still the option to disable the cookie by clicking a link at the top right of a search results page.
Weren’t they already tracking everyone? Or were they merely allowing third parties such as the NSA et. al. to track everyone?
What? hahaha, I hope this post is a joke, right?
I mean “Tech Radar”… those journalists and their readers should know that every move on the internet is being recorded somewhere, and if only for technical purposes to find bugs… Statcounter, adserve etc. are the new tracking devices.
And the mere scribal presence on the internet. Lateley I heard of some genetic engineering software used for lexical analysis to find similar grammar and lexical pattern in a group of users. How simple! Our individual use of words is – at least in the mother tongue – mostly the same.
I call bs on every article I read about this topic, as long as it doesn’t give practical countermeasures to evade data mining.