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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of the yr |
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| Saffiyah |
| 02/20/03 at 18:07:39 |
| Google deserves your nomination for Big Brother of the Year http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html 1. Google's immortal cookie: Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number. 2. Google records everything they can: For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation." 3. Google retains all data indefinitely: Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save. 4. Google won't say why they need this data: Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment. 5. Google hires spooks: Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington. 6. Google's toolbar is spyware: With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf. Yes, it reads your cookie too, and sends along the last search terms you used in the toolbar. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you phone home. Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google. 7. Google's cache copy is illegal: Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in" for webmasters, not "opt-out." 8. Google is not your friend: Young, stupid script kiddies and many bloggers still think Google is "way kool," so by now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. No webmaster can avoid seeking Google's approval these days, assuming he wants to increase traffic to his site. If he tries to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google's semi-secret algorithms, he may find himself penalized by Google, and his traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time they don't even answer email from webmasters. 9. Google is a privacy time bomb: With 150 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved. Google deserves your nomination for corporate Big Brother of the Year. |
| NS |
| Re: Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of th |
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| Kareema_Abdul-Khab |
| 02/20/03 at 18:46:42 |
| Is that why they're such a good search engine compared to the other heavies i.e. aol, yahoo, msn etc.? I remember gratefully retrieveing needed documents from their cached files, and will continue. Since I'm at school, Idon't really care what the cookies catch, noone will remember me. So I think their 'snoopware' is part of why they're so good(someone correct me if I'm wrong) and if you have privacy issues, maybe you can just go to a public computer. They should really tell peeps though that their cookies don't expire and that it helps their search engine |
| Re: Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of th |
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| jannah |
| 02/20/03 at 19:03:09 |
| Most people do not have the luxury of using a public computer. (or should I say misery :)) But even if you do, when you enter your email and then google or vice versa it keeps track of that. It will always know "who" you are and what you're doing. Snoopware and tracking is really a lot more insiduous than we think. There was a great article I just recently read about Kazaa that was really frightening. I even downloaded some software to check what was running on my computer and was pretty shocked. Did you know there could be all kinds of stuff running in the background you have no knowledge of sending all your personal details to their 'home' computer for analysis and record. It's pretty scary. Now they say it's to target you for certain types of ads, but do you really want to be targeted? What if you visit the FBI page to see what is written on OBL, do bells go off somewhere and some snoop bot starts tracking exactly what you're logging into what websites you're visiting, who you're sending email to. I thought the internet was the last free frontier.. guess I shoulda known they'd find a way to ruin it :) |
| Re: Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of th |
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| ascetic |
| 02/20/03 at 19:31:47 |
| A lot of information archived by Google is available in the public domain as well using the google API. Basically, developers can write code which can query the vast amount of information that Google "caches". (although I doubt they let you query up IP-related information *yet*) Google works hand-in-glove w/ the DoD (Department of Defense) since most of the research related to this area is funded by the military anyways. In fact, my professor (who played a big role in developing Google technology) tells us that right now the key area where a lot of research money is going is Knowledge retrieval, i.e. given terabytes of data, how can you detect patterns and glean information from unstructured data. With the military funding this project, I don't need to tell you the sinister applications of this research ::) Incidentally, we just had a lecture by Sergey Brin/Larry Page who were trying to scout new grad students to work on improving Google |
| Re: Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of th |
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| Kareema_Abdul-Khab |
| 02/20/03 at 22:57:19 |
| So if I emailed something or I used my email account at Yahoo it would know my info from that??!! I recently got a charge from my bank account from a company I've never even heard off. I always buy stuff online, bank online, etc, etc,. I wonder if my online use had anything to do with that. |
| Re: Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of th |
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| Asim |
| 03/01/03 at 13:48:38 |
| Assalaamu alaikum, I don't believe using your e-mail at Yahoo, Hotmail, etc would be caught by Google... maybe by someone else along the way. The internet was designed with little security for research collaboration. Who knew it would become such a huge thing with critical information shared over it. Its underlying design remains the same since its inception. The basics of Google's search algorithm are known. It uses a probability-based AI algorithm that ranks pages based on the number of times the page is linked from other pages and the rank of those pages (e.g. a page would be ranked higher if it is linked by a higher ranked page than by several low-ranked pages). In any case, Google spends a lot on research and does not make them available, so the actual algorithm might be quite different from the basic one. Google does keep track of HUGE amounts of data. As Zahid mentioned, knowledge discovery or data mining is used to find interesting patterns in large amounts of data. This is an area in which DoD and other U.S. agencies have invested MASSIVELY (especially after 9-11). So basically they are/will be able to find any specific behavior (like sudden increase in e-mail activity, or decrease in acitivity, or increase in use of a word, etc, etc). There is also an effort to merge all databases (census, BMV, passport, telephone, internet, cell, crime, credit, etc). With this warehouse, they can pretty much do anything. Being a data mining researcher myself, I know the results that one gets from DM algorithms can misleading and open to interpretation (like person "muslimname" visits site "islamicwebsite" -> he buys item "book on nuclear physics"). What surprises me is the U.S. public has voiced little against these efforts...the agencies are going to do it anyway, but the resistance has been muted for some reason. Wasalaam. |
| Re: Google deserves ur nomination for BigBro of th |
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| BroHanif |
| 03/01/03 at 18:52:41 |
| The internet was designed by the good old US Army in case there was aever a nuclear attack computers would still be able to communicate to each other. Does it not suprise you then that there is so much spyware and a case of Geroge Orwell ?. And if you thought going things electronic was going to save you, well think again. Recently researchers have come up with a saying that within five emails they can link you up with anyone. Email is so widely used that its possible that is the most used communitcation medium. Ask all the network techies at work and they assure you that most traffic in terms of volume would be e-mail. Salaams Hanif |
| NS |
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