Posted on 01/24/2012 3:05:35 PM PST by Freedom56v2
Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices.
The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes.
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The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones.
FAQ: What kind of data can Google collect and integrate? How will this affect me?
The changes comes as Google is facing stiff competition and recently disappointed investors for the first time in several quarters, failing last week to meet earnings expectations. Apple, perhaps its primary rival, is expected to announce strong earnings Tuesday.
Google’s changes are appeared squarely aimed at Apple and Facebook, which have been successful in keeping people in their ecosystem of products. Google, which makes money by selling ads tailored to its users, is hoping to do the same by offering a Web experience tailored to personal tastes.
“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post.
“In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
If you look at the gmail URL, it's "mail.google.com". So the cookies that gmail sets are visible to google.com. It also knows the IP address you logged in from. This allows it to connect what you search for on google with your gmail user ID.
No human person (in theory) reads your emails, but software parses your emails for words and phrases that can be used to tailor ads to you.
All this is very confusing to me. So if I use Firefox to access Free Republic and then open Explorer in a totally separate window outside of Firefox, Firefox would know I used Explorer to access the web site GardeningWeb in Explorer and Explorer would know I have Free Republic running on Fire fox?
Good question!
Wouldn’t a dynamic IP address ameliorate some of their tracking—after deleting cookies of course...
Firefox stores all it knows about you in your profile. Your profile is the directory under which Firefox stores all it knows about you — your preferences, your saved passwords, your cookies, your browsing history, cache, your set of installed add-ons, etc. Delete your profile, and Firefox will be forced to start its relationship with you over from scratch.
Each user on a given computer has one Firefox profile, and that's usually that. However, it's possible to set up multiple profiles for one user. Normally, that's only useful if you're doing development, e.g., debugging an add-on or something. However, since the profiles are completely separate, having multiple ones could also be useful to prevent information leakage, such as we are discussing. It has the same effect as using different browsers without requiring you to use a different browser.
You can learn how to set up multiple profiles here.
But doesn’t Google own YouTube?
Hadn’t seen that one.
The one I read was here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376023,00.asp
Can’t post the article under FR rules.
Always looking for more ways to inundate you with advertising.
Interesting! Thanks.
Thanks for posting. Sure it will be interesting.
It’s not the advertising that is worrisome. It is the tracking.
All your gmail emails are parsed by computer. Send a friend an email with say the word China in it. You’ll probably see a targeted ad about trips to China in the sidebar very soon after. It’s the same for Yahoo and I expect hotmail/windows live also.
If you want privacy, the best bet is get your own domain or there is always hushmail.com.
“With a response like that you clearly don’t understand the scope of this.”
How so?
We need more competitors.
China’s Alibaba hires US lobbying firm as it eyes buying Yahoo!
No, Firefox has no idea what Internet Explorer is doing and vice versa, unless you ask one of them to import cookies or other stuff from the other.
But all windows of Firefox know what the other windows of Firefox are doing, and all windows of Internet Explorer know what the other windows of Internet Explorer are doing.
That too.
Another advantage is that you can run it from a thumb drive and take your bookmarks and settings to another computer.
thanks!
Thanks! I'd heard of that in connection with thumb drives, but I'd never actually looked at it.
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