Google is mapping your "brain"

There was in interesting report on Google on the BBC's Money Program last night, the worst part of the report was that google is storing all your search terms, the pages you visit from their site and the files you view whilst you're there. Some of this data has already been used in legal cases. I found this one quite funny Robert_Petrick . Seems the best thing to do is block all cookies from google, which unfortunately doesn't allow you to migrate from their page to the links but you can copy the address's from the results to a new browser, thats what I'll be doing from now on anyway .

i only use search to search stuff that no one cares about like newegg cause i forget there url or car reviews or electronic reviews etc etc

Watched that as well. Interesting stuff.

Do I now need to be worried at my plans to take over the world? :naughty:

Mark

Great, now my wife isn't the only one who thinks I'm a pervert..
I wonder what compelled the police to contact google about his searches, something on his machine?
I think this was/is an issue with gmail, I sure am glad I have nothing to hide..

What's worrying is if these successful prosecutions set a precedent and police begin to request this kind of information as a matter of course. Just as an example say someone from this forum was arrested on suspicion of assault, caught up in some salooney. The police get your search results, and I would imagine a lot of people that use this forum are also interested in guns, knives, military and covert equipment. No matter how innocuous you percieve your searches to be, from anothers view you could be easily described a weapon obsessed fantasist, I've seen "material" evidence used in prosecutions before where a guy who lives by himself and collects gun magazines is suddenly construed as some sort of "psycho loner obsessive".

Pydpiper said:

I wonder what compelled the police to contact google about his searches, something on his machine?
I think this was/is an issue with gmail, I sure am glad I have nothing to hide..

Click to expand...

From the original article, this, apparently was all from his browser history and/or other foot prints left on his 14 computers. :wow:

Petrick, acting as his own attorney, claimed prosecutors couldn't tie him to the Internet searches.

Google, the company, had no idea what was happening. All of the evidence was culled from the 14 computers seized in the case.

Click to expand...

-Bill

But even if he had "cleaned" his own computers all of that information on his searches would have been stored "offsite" ie. in googles, or any other search engines databases.

Freedom on the internet is long gone. Actually, it sounds worse than in normal life ... anyone can intercept, store and manipulate data when and how they want. and it will be used against you.

Put that together with the rest of the modern age "surveillance tech" like nano chips, credit cards, teh Galileo System et al ... and we there, technically at least.

Gotta hate that world.

bernie

That's like attaching a GPS to our cars and monitoring if we are speeding and where we are going.

I have been having some strange things happening with google as of late. Sometimes it will take me to an error page saying that I look like I may be a robot search or I might have a virus or spywear. It has me enter a few code letters to continue. Anyone else get this?

I think I may have to stop using google and switch over to a non big brother search engine. Any suggestions?

CroMAGnet -- I've never seen a results page from Google that include what you mentioned...that's weird, and not very Google-like. I'd be very suspicious of that.

As far as privacy goes, you might be surprised to learn that Google is the only company fighting the government over federal subpoenas for their search records.

Don't get me wrong, I don't trust any large organization, commercial or social. All carry the potential to destroy privacy and freedom of choice. But at least Google seems to be willing to appear to fight for their user's privacy.

Scary stuff tho'. The opposite edge of the information sword I guess. :shrug:

I've never seen that before either, but it could be one of googles attempts to prevent "click fraud". In the program they mentioned a growing problem where competitors are furiously clicking away on eachothers "sponsored" links (those on the right of the google search) as the company pays google everytime they get a hit from the search page.

I have had that message before, it askes you to duplicate some text before continuing.. I get the same message from time to time from EBAY.

Yeah, whatever shred of internet privacy was left, not that there ever was much, has been googled away.

At this point though, most of us should know where to find the info we want without needing to use google.

These days, I just use wikipedia.

OMG click fraud! That could hurt the massive revenue that google makes on selling those spots. Imagine if you were paying for fraudulent clicks in your ad! ow the heck can you stop that. I wonder if Wall Street knows :Thinking:

Next time I get that google bot page I'll try to link it or paste it here.

You don't pay google for those ads on the right of a search CroMAGnet you suggest them. Give a few keywords that might make you "pop up" an ya sorted. So everythin is ticketyboo ya got free advertisin.............. hang on someone clicked my google link now I have to pay google $0.10 . Now someone is clickin it for fun, now someone has a bot doin it, now I owe google $7000

This episode does not bother me at all. It's simply the police using information stored on the guy's computer. That's the same as if they used his diary or letters to an accomplice.

To the best of my knowledge, it would be exceedingly difficult for google or any other single company to provide evidence that a specific person performed a specific search at any particular time in the past. The use of temporary addresses and network address translaton (NAT) at firewalls makes it difficult to track exactly who makes what queries UNLESS THE POLICE CAN ACCESS THE PERSON'S COMPUTER TOO.

If the man were represented by a good attorney they would have shown that 1) the evidence could have been easily altered and 2) the computer could have been hijacked and 3) there was no evidence that the murderer was the one doing the searches instead of his wife and .. and.. well, there are just too many ways that it could have been bogus. A good lawyer would have trotted out all those things.

I remember back in the 1970's when we had to present investigators with the original printouts of phone traces so there would be no question that they were altered. Ignore the fact that print outs are manufactured in the first place. The idea was that they insisted on the best possible evidence.

Besides, as someone said, i'm not doing much worth worrying about.

Daniel

Well lets take a trip through customs, did you pack this bag yourself sir? who had accesss to your bag? You're missing the point Gadget, I'm not bothered about my attempts to kill my wife,brother,girlfriend,woman next door. I'm concerned about the information, and as we all know already at some point someone somewhere will say "yeah, thats my price"

Sorry I have to post another reply before anyone thinks Gadgets post is gospel.



To the best of my knowledge, it would be exceedingly difficult for google or any other single company to provide evidence that a specific person performed a specific search at any particular time in the past.

Thats absolute nonsense Gadget your internet provider logs every Ip you visit.

If you have a dynamic IP you might confuse the end site , but never your ISP.


the 1970's where 30 years ago.

While solar flare may be correct, I've not seen any evidence to support that assertion.

It's not likely, and I'll tell you why. First of all, the minimum data needed to "log every ip you visit" is only a dozen bytes including time stamp information. Add a bit more for indexing and keys (databases, you know) and you end up with 128bytes per connection. You also have to track which subscriber is assigned that address. Now a typical page that CPF presents has at least 15 graphics that are on different systems. That's 15 IP addresses every time you open a thread on CPF. I use 30 articles per page, so it's more like 40 for me.

So the ISP has to store 40 * 128bytes every time I refresh a page. I refresh every 30 seconds or so. Multiply that by 10,000 for AOL. That's a lot of data to store daily. Even more important, that's a lot of data to search through. Even if they do that, they have no idea if it's me, a neighbor or my kids using the computer. All they have is the address. Storing the address gives no value when searching unless you are targeting a person already. In that case there are better ways to spy on them.

I use my ISP only for the IP connection, so unless they are doing some serious data storage they are not likely to be gathering any info on me.

BTW, I work with networks, mail servers and web systems. It's hard to log all web browsing activity for a small (500 person) company. I can only imagine the amount of data a mom and pop ISP could handle.

Go ahead and worry about it. I won't lose any sleep over it.

Not all people or court subpeona'd records are the police getting at breaking the law. What about personal law suits. They're pretty dirty fighters, especially if they have the money.

CroMAGnet OMG click fraud! That could hurt the massive revenue that google makes on selling those spots. Imagine if you were paying for fraudulent clicks in your ad! ow the heck can you stop that. I wonder if Wall Street knows :Thinking:

Next time I get that google bot page I'll try to link it or paste it here.

SolarFlare You don't pay google for those ads on the right of a search CroMAGnet you suggest them. Give a few keywords that might make you "pop up" an ya sorted. So everythin is ticketyboo ya got free advertisin.............. hang on someone clicked my google link now I have to pay google $0.10 . Now someone is clickin it for fun, now someone has a bot doin it, now I owe google $7000

Click to expand...

SolarFlare: What I meant was that if the fraud is rampant then companies will not use this form of advertising. This could kill google. It can be done at many levels, from the small businesses to hugh ones that advertise on google. This could spell bad news for their stock if this news spreads and starts to snowball. In fact, just thinking about it now, I'm not sure I would advertise my company this way or at least monitor it very closely.