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The official title of the article is "How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect", and the writing itself is much

The official title of the article is "How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect", and the writing itself is much more neutral than this submission title. I'm still not sure why people are afraid of Google's new privacy policy. I understand that there are people who have specific privacy needs, but outside that scope I doubt you have anything to worry about. It's doubtful at best that Google's "log" of you would become compromised (unless your personal account were compromised, but then this would have been a problem anyways!). It also isn't the case that some Google employee is reading row after row of Google's customer DB snooping on individuals. Google isn't some unified entity; your data is being manipulated by advertising algorithms to tailor ads for you. Unless you care about a CPU "knowing" your secrets, or you have specific privacy needs/concerns, none of this is a problem. Maybe someone can surprise me with some good reasons to be concerned, but until then I am trusting Google.

bootload 15y ago
"How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect" the title is 88 char so something had to go.
crockstar 15y ago
My feelings and the reason that (personally) I don't want this is I spend all day doing online marketing for brands and retailers and I have very different interests outside of work. The system (at present) does not seem intelligent enough to decipher between which of my friends should suggest what film I should go to vs. which should be giving me financial advice vs. which are just backing a product because they're a client. Strictly regarding the web/search history thing, if I work on a campaign for Burger King and browse their site and related products a lot of the day, I don't really want "Burger King" to come up first on a search with local intent for "restaurants in New York", in that instance I'd prefer see the generic results. For me it's not that I don't want Google to have the data or I have anything to hide, it's that I think the "search" experience it creates because of my very different needs in and out of work is poor (and likely to get worse with sharing this data across platform) and I don't want to spend my days having to keep a super close eye on which account I'm currently logged into before doing a search. It's all personal preference and for some this will provide a great experience, and it may get better. For now though, I like the ability to say "no thank you, I like generic search".
- bensummers 15y ago
  Have you discovered Google Chrome's helpful "Users" feature? I use it for keeping Facebook and other abusive sites away from my main web activity, but it sounds like you've got a good use case for "Work" and "Real life" users.
chmike 15y ago
I don't want to be put in a glasshouse where google introduce bias on its own agenda on search results. The claim that it is for my best is also a claim made by all the spammers. Google is also subordinate to US interests and this is another problem for people like me who live out of the US. Without saying so, google is building its own great wall of china, but worse, around each individual using google search. I'm using DuckDuckGo for now. I understand that SEO are corrupting search result pertinence and google is trying to do something about it. But there is no guarantee that it's new strategy will make things better.
__alexs 15y ago
It's not that I'm worried about Google doing evil things with my data, I'm worried about it increasing the complexity of the identity management I already have to do. I don't want Google targeting ads at me while I'm at work, based on searches I did at home. I don't want to have to worry about the carefully targeted adverts displayed on random webpages I show people on my screen. I don't want my hypothetical future child having to worry about accidentally disclosing via content targeting that they L, G, B or T before they want to. Until it's obvious that Google are building tools that let me actually cope with these sorts of problems safely, and easily I'm happy to not have my thousands upon thousands of Google searches being centrally logged. Even if it was an occasionally useful feature. Remember, people are not normal. The long tail is still long and there are a vast number of people out there with "specific privacy needs" that are "outside that scope" and definitely do have something to worry about.
- andymurd 15y ago
  You make excellent points, and I'd like to add one more: Google's personalized search is just not as good as their unpersonalized search. The time I was Googling for suitable Xmas presents for my Grandma should not influence my searches for valentines gifts. Incidentally, am I the only one to mentally filter out search results that have the avatar of an online "friend" recommending them? Is that link was ranked highly just because someone I've never met tweeted it?
fauigerzigerk 15y ago
My concern is that someone out there is accumulating a huge amount of very personal information about me. It happens to be a corporation that has a legal obligation not to me but to its shareholders and that obligation is to maximise profit. It also has a legal obligation to the US government and the US courts, a government I have no right to elect and a legal system I cannot afford. And here's my point: I simply cannot know or control what profit maximising ideas they may come up with in the future or what kinds of ideas politicians may deem necessary in order to win an election. Some say that it will always be more profitable for Google to "respect my privacy". The problem is that the meaning of "respect my privacy" is a matter of fast changing attitudes. It's not my personal privacy they need to be concerned about, it's what the vast majority of their users will passively accept. Their privacy policy says they can do anything with my data to create new services and improve existing ones. That means they can do anything. Full stop. The reason why I'm more concerned about their new privacy policy than about the old one is that lots of small piles of information are less dangerous than one big pile of information, exactly for the reason they are creating it: The value of accumulated information is more than the sum of its parts. The conclusions that can be drawn from that combined dataset are a lot more reliable and robust. Right now, much of the data that is out there about us is basically garbage and everyone knows it. No one can know if it means anything that I supposedly visited this or that site. But if they can also analyse what I searched for, what my emails are about, what blogs I read, which people I communicate with, etc, they can learn something about my intentions, not just about my actions and they can throw out the garbage. I don't want all my intentions to be known or to be knowable to anyone on earth because I cannot know or control the intentions of those wanting to know my intentions. It's a onesided shift of power away from me and I can never take it back. Once the data has become so much more reliable and the conclusions so much more robust, the desire to use that information for all kinds of new purposes will grow accordingly. The pressure on Google to use that knowledge to increase profit will grow. The incentive for criminals to steal the data will grow. The pressure on governments to proactively spy on everyone to prevent this or that type of crime will grow. This is not me saying "Google has turned evil". It's just a recognition of an inevitable social and economic dynamic ensuing from the possibilities that well intregrated, high quality, sets of personal data provide. I know more than the vast majority of people about data analysis and hence I will not delegate what "respecting my privacy" means to that majority of passive Google (or Faceboook, ...) users.
j_col 15y ago
HN has a character limit on the size of the title, I think it's around 80 characters so the OP probably had to edit the original title to fit in here.
ragmondo 15y ago
My rationale behind this is one of "I trust you but not your boss" or "I trust you today but I don't know if I can trust you tomorrow". I use this in telemarketing calls or whenever someone asks me for more information than they actually need.
tripzilch 15y ago
> The official title of the article is "How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect", and the writing itself is much more neutral than this submission title. The submitter just removed the "How to" crud from the title! :) If that encroaches too much on your ability to neutrally assess a topic title, well, this ain't gonna be your century. > It's doubtful at best that Google's "log" of you would become compromised (unless your personal account were compromised, but then this would have been a problem anyways!). It also isn't the case that some Google employee is reading row after row of Google's customer DB snooping on individuals. Both of these cases have happened in the past. Personal accounts have been compromised. That this sucks for other reasons doesn't make it less of a problem--labelling your house keys with your home address is still a stupid idea, regardless of whether losing your house keys "would have been a problem anyways!". Google employees have been snooping on individuals (minors, even) in Google's customer DB. They were fired on the spot, but afaik no legal charges were pressed. So basically you just told yourself a pretty lie, writing what you want to believe, not the way things actually are. How can you speak of neutral writing? And then there's of course the government requests: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ See, on one hand I can see your point. IF all my data would forever remain under the sole control of Google AND will only ever be used in the ways they tell us it is used now THEN yes I concede there is little practical concerns to be worried about. But if you believe those two requirements are met today and will remain so as long as Google possesses relevant data about yourself, you are deluding yourself. The data is already being given to the US government and maybe others too. Data leaks are not going to get less, and exploits will not stop to be found, and at some point it'll be Google's turn. Finally there's the possibility that Google will have a change of "mind" and either turn evil, sell their data, starts doing less conscionable types of data mining, or maybe simply becomes utterly lax in protecting your data. It's a risk. Combine all those risks and it'd be pretty naive to just ignore the facts and hope for the best.
jonnathanson 15y ago
"or you have specific privacy needs/concerns" With all due respect, this attitude really disturbs me. It's becoming very common these days: the implication that only deviants, criminals, off-the-grid wackos, and the anti-social have any real need for privacy. No. I reject that premise. We all have a right to privacy, and we shouldn't have to give our reasons. (That's why it's privacy, after all!). We're quickly turning into a society whose members need to opt into privacy, and in which doing so is somehow stigmatized as abnormal. I'm not suggesting that you are championing such a viewpoint, or that you even mean to suggest it. But that line of yours -- the idea that only a subset of us have privacy "needs" or "concerns" -- is troubling, and it reflects the rapidly encroaching, popular attitude of which I'm speaking. [FWIW, I agree with you that Google's data-gathering isn't exactly a cause for immediate alarm. It's hardly taking us on some ominous path toward 1984. But I'm more concerned about the slow, steady erosion of privacy in the digital space, of which Google's activities are only one small part.]
- reader5000 15y ago
  Although I dont disagree with your point I took the phrase to refer to e.g. political dissidents and the like.
  - jonnathanson 15y ago
    Fair. Whatever case you want to call it, the point is that privacy shouldn't have to be a conditional, special-case thing (a "specific" "concern" or "need").
    - Karunamon 15y ago
      I think the point he was making is that the average person doesn't need to (or want to) care about these kind of things. I mean, the mentality I'm seeing on HN and Reddit and other sites nowadays is "How DARE $company tie my activities using their service to the IP address I accessed it from!" It always seemed like common sense to me that any data I give a company (whether implicitly or explicitly) would be combined and reused and remixed in almost any way possible. Google is welcome to my web activity, as far as I'm concerned, that's my payment for some really awesome web services that don't really have an equal anywhere else, especially wrt. integration. But then again, I'm not a political dissident and I don't really have anything to hide during an average day on the internet. (And if/when I do have something to hide, I take steps to anonymize myself) There most certainly is something as a need for a certain degree of privacy, but please do not confuse "need" for "justification". A soccer mom's average activities might not need privacy, but any justification she has is none of anyone's damn business but hers. If she wants to keep everything she does private, fine. Someone who has a need for privacy would be the usual, political dissidents, unpopular opinions, etc.

bootload 15y ago

"How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect" the title is 88 char so something had to go.

crockstar 15y ago

My feelings and the reason that (personally) I don't want this is I spend all day doing online marketing for brands and retailers and I have very different interests outside of work. The system (at present) does not seem intelligent enough to decipher between which of my friends should suggest what film I should go to vs. which should be giving me financial advice vs. which are just backing a product because they're a client. Strictly regarding the web/search history thing, if I work on a campaign for Burger King and browse their site and related products a lot of the day, I don't really want "Burger King" to come up first on a search with local intent for "restaurants in New York", in that instance I'd prefer see the generic results. For me it's not that I don't want Google to have the data or I have anything to hide, it's that I think the "search" experience it creates because of my very different needs in and out of work is poor (and likely to get worse with sharing this data across platform) and I don't want to spend my days having to keep a super close eye on which account I'm currently logged into before doing a search. It's all personal preference and for some this will provide a great experience, and it may get better. For now though, I like the ability to say "no thank you, I like generic search".

bensummers 15y ago
Have you discovered Google Chrome's helpful "Users" feature? I use it for keeping Facebook and other abusive sites away from my main web activity, but it sounds like you've got a good use case for "Work" and "Real life" users.

chmike 15y ago

I don't want to be put in a glasshouse where google introduce bias on its own agenda on search results. The claim that it is for my best is also a claim made by all the spammers. Google is also subordinate to US interests and this is another problem for people like me who live out of the US. Without saying so, google is building its own great wall of china, but worse, around each individual using google search. I'm using DuckDuckGo for now. I understand that SEO are corrupting search result pertinence and google is trying to do something about it. But there is no guarantee that it's new strategy will make things better.

__alexs 15y ago

It's not that I'm worried about Google doing evil things with my data, I'm worried about it increasing the complexity of the identity management I already have to do. I don't want Google targeting ads at me while I'm at work, based on searches I did at home. I don't want to have to worry about the carefully targeted adverts displayed on random webpages I show people on my screen. I don't want my hypothetical future child having to worry about accidentally disclosing via content targeting that they L, G, B or T before they want to. Until it's obvious that Google are building tools that let me actually cope with these sorts of problems safely, and easily I'm happy to not have my thousands upon thousands of Google searches being centrally logged. Even if it was an occasionally useful feature. Remember, people are not normal. The long tail is still long and there are a vast number of people out there with "specific privacy needs" that are "outside that scope" and definitely do have something to worry about.

andymurd 15y ago
You make excellent points, and I'd like to add one more: Google's personalized search is just not as good as their unpersonalized search. The time I was Googling for suitable Xmas presents for my Grandma should not influence my searches for valentines gifts. Incidentally, am I the only one to mentally filter out search results that have the avatar of an online "friend" recommending them? Is that link was ranked highly just because someone I've never met tweeted it?

fauigerzigerk 15y ago

My concern is that someone out there is accumulating a huge amount of very personal information about me. It happens to be a corporation that has a legal obligation not to me but to its shareholders and that obligation is to maximise profit. It also has a legal obligation to the US government and the US courts, a government I have no right to elect and a legal system I cannot afford. And here's my point: I simply cannot know or control what profit maximising ideas they may come up with in the future or what kinds of ideas politicians may deem necessary in order to win an election. Some say that it will always be more profitable for Google to "respect my privacy". The problem is that the meaning of "respect my privacy" is a matter of fast changing attitudes. It's not my personal privacy they need to be concerned about, it's what the vast majority of their users will passively accept. Their privacy policy says they can do anything with my data to create new services and improve existing ones. That means they can do anything. Full stop. The reason why I'm more concerned about their new privacy policy than about the old one is that lots of small piles of information are less dangerous than one big pile of information, exactly for the reason they are creating it: The value of accumulated information is more than the sum of its parts. The conclusions that can be drawn from that combined dataset are a lot more reliable and robust. Right now, much of the data that is out there about us is basically garbage and everyone knows it. No one can know if it means anything that I supposedly visited this or that site. But if they can also analyse what I searched for, what my emails are about, what blogs I read, which people I communicate with, etc, they can learn something about my intentions, not just about my actions and they can throw out the garbage. I don't want all my intentions to be known or to be knowable to anyone on earth because I cannot know or control the intentions of those wanting to know my intentions. It's a onesided shift of power away from me and I can never take it back. Once the data has become so much more reliable and the conclusions so much more robust, the desire to use that information for all kinds of new purposes will grow accordingly. The pressure on Google to use that knowledge to increase profit will grow. The incentive for criminals to steal the data will grow. The pressure on governments to proactively spy on everyone to prevent this or that type of crime will grow. This is not me saying "Google has turned evil". It's just a recognition of an inevitable social and economic dynamic ensuing from the possibilities that well intregrated, high quality, sets of personal data provide. I know more than the vast majority of people about data analysis and hence I will not delegate what "respecting my privacy" means to that majority of passive Google (or Faceboook, ...) users.

j_col 15y ago

HN has a character limit on the size of the title, I think it's around 80 characters so the OP probably had to edit the original title to fit in here.

ragmondo 15y ago

My rationale behind this is one of "I trust you but not your boss" or "I trust you today but I don't know if I can trust you tomorrow". I use this in telemarketing calls or whenever someone asks me for more information than they actually need.

tripzilch 15y ago

> The official title of the article is "How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect", and the writing itself is much more neutral than this submission title. The submitter just removed the "How to" crud from the title! :) If that encroaches too much on your ability to neutrally assess a topic title, well, this ain't gonna be your century. > It's doubtful at best that Google's "log" of you would become compromised (unless your personal account were compromised, but then this would have been a problem anyways!). It also isn't the case that some Google employee is reading row after row of Google's customer DB snooping on individuals. Both of these cases have happened in the past. Personal accounts have been compromised. That this sucks for other reasons doesn't make it less of a problem--labelling your house keys with your home address is still a stupid idea, regardless of whether losing your house keys "would have been a problem anyways!". Google employees have been snooping on individuals (minors, even) in Google's customer DB. They were fired on the spot, but afaik no legal charges were pressed. So basically you just told yourself a pretty lie, writing what you want to believe, not the way things actually are. How can you speak of neutral writing? And then there's of course the government requests: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ See, on one hand I can see your point. IF all my data would forever remain under the sole control of Google AND will only ever be used in the ways they tell us it is used now THEN yes I concede there is little practical concerns to be worried about. But if you believe those two requirements are met today and will remain so as long as Google possesses relevant data about yourself, you are deluding yourself. The data is already being given to the US government and maybe others too. Data leaks are not going to get less, and exploits will not stop to be found, and at some point it'll be Google's turn. Finally there's the possibility that Google will have a change of "mind" and either turn evil, sell their data, starts doing less conscionable types of data mining, or maybe simply becomes utterly lax in protecting your data. It's a risk. Combine all those risks and it'd be pretty naive to just ignore the facts and hope for the best.

jonnathanson 15y ago

"or you have specific privacy needs/concerns" With all due respect, this attitude really disturbs me. It's becoming very common these days: the implication that only deviants, criminals, off-the-grid wackos, and the anti-social have any real need for privacy. No. I reject that premise. We all have a right to privacy, and we shouldn't have to give our reasons. (That's why it's privacy, after all!). We're quickly turning into a society whose members need to opt into privacy, and in which doing so is somehow stigmatized as abnormal. I'm not suggesting that you are championing such a viewpoint, or that you even mean to suggest it. But that line of yours -- the idea that only a subset of us have privacy "needs" or "concerns" -- is troubling, and it reflects the rapidly encroaching, popular attitude of which I'm speaking. [FWIW, I agree with you that Google's data-gathering isn't exactly a cause for immediate alarm. It's hardly taking us on some ominous path toward 1984. But I'm more concerned about the slow, steady erosion of privacy in the digital space, of which Google's activities are only one small part.]

reader5000 15y ago
Although I dont disagree with your point I took the phrase to refer to e.g. political dissidents and the like.
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  Fair. Whatever case you want to call it, the point is that privacy shouldn't have to be a conditional, special-case thing (a "specific" "concern" or "need").
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    I think the point he was making is that the average person doesn't need to (or want to) care about these kind of things. I mean, the mentality I'm seeing on HN and Reddit and other sites nowadays is "How DARE $company tie my activities using their service to the IP address I accessed it from!" It always seemed like common sense to me that any data I give a company (whether implicitly or explicitly) would be combined and reused and remixed in almost any way possible. Google is welcome to my web activity, as far as I'm concerned, that's my payment for some really awesome web services that don't really have an equal anywhere else, especially wrt. integration. But then again, I'm not a political dissident and I don't really have anything to hide during an average day on the internet. (And if/when I do have something to hide, I take steps to anonymize myself) There most certainly is something as a need for a certain degree of privacy, but please do not confuse "need" for "justification". A soccer mom's average activities might not need privacy, but any justification she has is none of anyone's damn business but hers. If she wants to keep everything she does private, fine. Someone who has a need for privacy would be the usual, political dissidents, unpopular opinions, etc.