Google, the privacy-breaching search engine

Everyones heard of google, but not everyone has heard of this

quote from www.google-watch.org

A new California law, the Online Privacy Protection Act, went into effect on July 1, 2004. Google changed their main privacy policy that same day because the previous version sidestepped important issues and might have been illegal. For the first time in Google's history, the language in their new policy makes it clear that they will be pooling all the information they collect on you from all of their various services. Moreover, they may keep this information indefinitely, and give this information to whomever they wish. All that's required is for Google to "have a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public." Google, you may recall, already believes that as a corporation they are utterly incapable of bad faith. Their corporate motto is "Don't be evil." Google even made sure that the Securities and Exchange Commission got this message in its IPO filing.

google tracks users through the use of cookies, the cia did the exact same thing on their website before being asked of it. stating

"It was a mistake on our part. It was not intentional,"

yet google continues to use such methods, think about it, if i were to track a society, how would i do it? through use of the largest and best known search database would be a start. information that google tracks include:

* your ip address
* the date and time stamp
* the name of the file that was accessed on our site
* the status code (whether the request succeeded)
* the number of bytes transferred
* the type of browser used


according to google watch, the information is gathered through the following
method

There are two methods for collecting your search terms, GET and POST. Search engines use GET because you can bookmark the search, link the search, and pass data inside the link. However, your search terms end up on the same line as your IP address in standard web logs all over the world with the GET method. This is "referrer" information, which is available to the distant webmaster every time you click on a link from a search results page.The webmaster knows that someone at your IP address accessed his page, and also knows what you were thinking from your search terms.

further information can be found at

www.google-watch.org


a scraper that uses the google engine but does not allow google to track your information is

www.scroogle.org (note: scroogle.com is porn :p)


lastly, a humourous quote from the cia

"The public does not need to be concerned that the CIA is tracking them. We're a bit busy to be doing that."

busy making sure people dont become aware that your tracking them?

[edit on 14-4-2007 by 117113]

Here's another search engine you can use that actually uses google but doesn't even keep the cookies or anything else.

Blackboxsearch