I had been feeling uneasy about the Google Search History option for sometime. Today found the perfect reason to get rid of the option from my Google account. Karen, Vice President of Marketing at Leaptag which is a personalized web content discovery tool, today described on her blog how her search history ended up being viewable by someone else. Not a good feeling when your past 2000 searches are available for someone to get insights on you. Right now, my search history is gone for good(I hope that is what happened when I hit the delete button).
If Google listens, here are few things Google can do for us – Let us view and manage logins for all the machines we are logged on at any moment of time. There should be another key/password to get entry to such a login manager. Provide a button for Google Toolbar that shows the logins for each of those machines in a drop-down. Also by default, “Remember me on this computer” option should be unchecked on all Google Services.
Any more ideas?
February 3, 2007 at 4:24 pm |
Yes, I discovered my own Google search history several months ago and was taken aback at the fact everything I looked up was being tracked. I’m usually not too concerned about privacy, but to me this seemed like a huge deal. I disabled the history, but I have no real proof that Google actually deleted or stopped collecting that information. Imagine the ramification that type of “feature” will have when governments decide they have a “right” to that information!!!
February 20, 2007 at 11:25 am |
[...] Best part about AdaptiveBlue is its focus on maintaining privacy around user data and still be able to provide personalized results unlike Google which has its own set of issues. The privacy part comes into play when you want to quickly get your list of personalized sites for the contextual linking in BlueOrganizer without storing your browsing history on a 3rd part server. All you need to do is, hit the “Personalize” button in the BlueOrganizer’s settings, and it goes through your browsing history, looks at the frequency of the sites you typically visit, runs some more analysis, and automatically loads your personalized site list. All the while, none of your browsing history related data ever gets moved over to AdaptiveBlue servers. Seems like a simple but smart solution to me. [...]
April 4, 2007 at 11:30 am |
[...] Couple of moths back I had written about Google Search History and how you can be better off without using it. As always Google teams are watching the blogosphere and move quickly on any user suggestions/complaints. Since my writing that post, Google now requires you to login to you account again if you want to view your search history. Again, this is in case of a computer your using for the first time. From there on, if you want, Google can remember your login credentials. [...]