
Googling yourself now leads to personal privacy controls - smaili
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_29964677/googling-yourself-now-leads-personal-privacy-controls
======
dingaling
Thank goodness this only works when you're logged-in; I had an unsettling fear
that this was going to be based on shadow profiling.

"Hello Aaron Smith. Do you want to learn what we know about you? By the way
your wife already knows about Sarah."

~~~
jacobush
Actually, it would have been better and more honest. Then people would
understand there is a dossier on them.

~~~
derefr
Well, hell, they show you that dossier right on google.com/account: recent
logins (with IP address, browser UA fingerprint, etc.), paired devices, search
history, etc. They even offer to export it for you (Google Takeout is one of
those "makes handing out information in response to subpoenas dead-simple"
codebases; I wouldn't be surprised if they _built_ it for law enforcement, and
then just thought of it as a free win to expose it to the user in question as
well.)

They don't include the _really_ interesting stuff, like what Adwords CPM
campaigns you've been counted as an impression or conversion for—but that's
more for technical reasons than honesty ones (ads run on massive realtime OLTP
pipelines that just increment counters in memory to record you; the system
just doesn't have _time_ to record a whole {campaign ID, your ID} tuple.)

But all that being said, the stated idea above—showing the account-privacy
offer to anyone Googling the name of X on a computer X _has_ logged into, even
if they are not presently logged into it—would be a privacy _leak_. (And don't
get me wrong, Google cooperates with authoritarian top-down privacy violation,
but that doesn't mean they don't do everything they can to prevent _peer_
privacy violation.)

Someone could go up to a computer you've used, type your name, and thereby
discover what your email address is. Imagine if there was a guaranteed way to
"sniff" someone's contact information off a public computer they just used,
where even clearing the browser's data completely wouldn't help—that's a big
target for both stalkers and social engineers.

~~~
Jordrok
I've always wondered about the extent of the info which DOESN'T make it into
these kind of data dump features. Once you start thinking about it, it's
incredibly obvious that the data made available to the user for export is only
a tiny fraction of what actually exists internally.

There are various justifications along a whole spectrum of legitimacy for not
disclosing everything. Does disclosing the way your data is analyzed reveal
trade secrets? What to do about data involving two or more parties (how many
times x has viewed y's facebook profile, etc)?

I get that there are reasons why they can't show us the content of that data,
but the fact that we will never know the true extent of what is even being
collected or how it will be used...that still makes me uneasy.

~~~
derefr
There are few† things you do that Google observes, that they don't observe
directly, with your device/browser sending Google a request. You can get a
pretty good sense of what Google's dossier on you would look like, just by
setting up a proxy with an access log for every request to Google's servers.

† I'm not sure what they learn about people that _doesn 't_ come from those
people making requests to Google. Like, even Google Analytics makes requests
to Google—and they don't have any equivalent functionality that _will_ take
server logs in place of client beacons. This almost seems like a
secret/implicit principle of Google, that's somehow persisted since the "Don't
Be Evil" days: only attempt to find out things about people by asking those
people directly, rather than by learning it from someone else.

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mikeash
I find it rather odd that the headline uses the word "now" and then the very
first word in the article indicates that it's not yet available.

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chipperyman573
Why has google been so (seemingly) open to wanting people to know how much
they (google) knows about them (the searcher)? They recently revamped the UIs,
made them easy to navigate, explained everything in detail, added extra
reminders to check it out, and now this. What does google gain?

~~~
TulliusCicero
Trust.

People know that Google depends on their data, so Google depends on a certain
level of trust being present so that people are willing to use Google's
products. It seems likely that being more transparent will lead to more trust.

~~~
infectoid
I think also it's correctness of the information. Google can only infer so
much about you. But for you to curate your own data, primed by them, helps
them to better target relevant information and advertisements to you.

It's good and bad I guess. But definitely helps to build trust.

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nkrisc
I wish I could Google all of Google's account settings; I can never find where
any of what I'm looking for is managed.

~~~
groby_b
[https://myaccount.google.com/preferences](https://myaccount.google.com/preferences)

app-specific ones are usually under a little gear-thingy on the right-hand
side.

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mark_l_watson
Sorry to be a little off topic, but I usually run Google in an incognito
window because I usually don't want search results biased by my previous
queries. Do other people here do that? It seems reasonable to get unbiased
results.

The downside of this is that searching your own search history is not as
useful.

~~~
f_allwein
(Disclaimer - I used to work for Google)

> search results biased by my previous queries

would that have to be a bad thing? I understand it prioritises search results
near you area, or remembers things like whether you're more into the country
or the animal when you search for [turkey].

I think concerns about the online filter bubble can be a bit overblown. We
have the same thing in real life too: e.g. I like to hang out with people who
share my world view rather than seek out those with opposing views.

~~~
r3bl
> I like to hang out with people who share my world view rather than seek out
> those with opposing views.

Well I would like to research the arguments from both sides in order to form
an informative opinion. If my search engine does not give me that but instead
shows me only results I would agree with initially on the top, what's the
point of using a search engine in the first place?

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ender89
That's weird, usually I check my personal privacy controls BEFORE googling
myself....

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King-Aaron
I know this is a little off topic, but I just googled my own name and an
article came up about another guy the same age as me with the same name being
shot in his home in America. Poor bloke, but what a weird thing to come
across.

~~~
andyjdavis
Curious if this will ever come up at a job interview ie the interviewer
jokingly saying something like "I notice you got shot but you seem fine now"
indicating that they googled you.

~~~
afarrell
Referring to lethal violence against someone you just met is generally
considered impolite in most contexts, so it seems unlikely, at least in the
United States.

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wefarrell
This doesn't work if you share a name with a celebrity :(

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personjerry
OT: I'm using Ghostery and this text is interlaced with something like 20 NDN
Player Suites; That seems like bad design.

Edit: To be clarify, I'm saying this suggests there may be a bug either with
the site or Ghostery.

~~~
jbob2000
Or, you know, a side effect of using Ghostery because it modifies the page...

