Instead of Adding Privacy, Google Lets You Watch Privacy Videos on YouTube

Submitted by MacRonin on November 2, 2007 - 9:10am

Instead of Adding Privacy, Google Lets You Watch Privacy Videos on YouTube: "

As government regulators around the world have started to take a hard look at the privacy practices of advertising giant Google, the company launched a new 'Privacy Channel' on Google, featuring a video explaining how Google search logs that contain terms you searched on and your IP address don't include any private information.

And this second 'privacy' video extols the virtue of Google's Web History program that records for forever all of your web wanderings so long as you are signed into your Google account such as when you check your Gmail account and then close the tab, rather than logging out.

The video skips right over the part where Google opts in new users to the tracking program without explaining to people what the program is or does.

Instead, it jumps from the 'create a Google account screen' to a heartwarming story about how having searched for the 'Rolling Stones' in the past will help Google disambiguate a later search on the word 'bass' - so it knows you are interested in the instrument, not the fish.

This might be interesting if it were true, which I doubt it is since I'd wager MORE people who searched on the 'Rolling Stones' in the past are anglers than musicians.

But why let that get in the way of a good cover story for why Google really wants to collect data about you which is, as we all know, the ad dollars.

But instead of waiting for Google to task its engineers with actual privacy work rather than making a lame YouTube channel and hiring lawyers to justify its current practices, Google users can take action themselves.

There's an open source Firefox plugin called CustomizeGoogle that lets you tell Firefox to 1) not send your clicks to Google 2) anonymize your Google ID so the company can't keep easily keep a record of your search terms and 3) set permanent Google preferences about SafeSearch, language preferences, and preferred number of results and 4) permanently filter designated sites from your search results.

Try finding a way to do that on a Google page.

It will also let you block Google Ads on every property the company runs. I haven't gone so far as to click those boxes, and am certainly not telling THREAT LEVEL readers to do so, but I must say its getting pretty tempting.

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(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

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