DeWitt Clinton

Actually, I may have to take back what I said about Google’s search history. It might not be that cool at all.

I just signed in to my Gmail account, read some mail, then an hour later after seeing another article (on Drudge, of all places) opened Google (I normally use A9 or Yahoo Search). I expected to see the new “sign in” link at the top of the page.

But no, I was already signed in. And my Google search history was already and automatically recording. I completely did not expect that.

So I signed out of Google, went back to Gmail, and sure enough — I was signed out of Gmail, too.

In essence what Google has done has made it such that if you sign in to Gmail, you are also agreeing to have all your searches tracked on Google. You don’t have a choice about this one. No Google saved searches, no Google email or personalized Google groups (remember, they bought the Usenet archives, too).

Yes — you can turn off your search history. But to quote Google’s privacy policy:

You can delete information from My Search History, and it will be removed from the service and no longer available to you. However, as is common practice in the industry, and as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users.

So even if you turn off your history, they are still recording it — and recording it along with your Gmail account’s username. You just can’t view it any more.

Now, this isn’t entirely different than anyone else, insofar as everyone keeps logs. But at least with a company like A9 I’m “opting in”, so to speak. I’m either choosing A9 because I want a search history, disabling it temporarily because I want to keep something private, or using the no-cookie version of A9.

I need to think this through a little more, but I wonder if Google really jumped the gun on this one without understanding all of the ramifications. Or, in a more cynical state of mind, I wonder if they knew exactly what they were doing.

Note, I’m a privacy advocate, but not a privacy freak. I don’t own a tin-foil hat, but I am one of the people that helped prioritize getting the easy-to-use “history toggle” on the A9 Toolbar. I use A9 (and Amazon) happily every day, but I wouldn’t want anyone to watch over me all day long. The convenience of search history needs to be balanced with privacy issues. Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don’t. However, I don’t want to have to trade off access to my email just to keep my searches private.

That said, I respect Google and expect that they will use this as part of the learning process. They seem to value their users (and turn out great products), and will hopefully put the concerns of their users before the concerns of their stockholders. If not, the IPO was one of the most colossal wastes of great potential of all time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under work. You can bookmark this post at delicious. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.