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The headline is misleading and this story is horribly one-sided. It is written as though Yahoo's policy is a breakthrough for privacy: "Under the new policy, Y
by briansmith 18y ago
The headline is misleading and this story is horribly one-sided. It is written as though Yahoo's policy is a breakthrough for privacy:
"Under the new policy, Yahoo will delete the last eight bits of the Internet Protocol, or I.P., address associated with a search query after 90 days."
This is the same trick that Google is trying to play on us. Basically, they still retain all information they use to track you indefinitely, except for 8 bits of it. With decent data-mining software you can still identify somebody pretty accurately even without those 8 bits.
Here is a better story that gives better information:
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20081217/wr_nm/us_yahoo_data http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20081217/wr_nm/us_yahoo_data
- sh1mmer 18y agoThe internal memo I got said "Anonymizing user log data". I doubt we are going to try to put it back together. You give us too much evil genius credit.
- Haskell 18y agoRemoving the last 8 bits or, by the way, the whole IP address from the user log data DOESN'T make it anonymous. http://tinyurl.com/l8rfm http://tinyurl.com/l8rfm "Yahoo will also hide cookie data related to each search log and strip out any personally identifiable information, like a name, phone number, address or Social Security number, from the query itself." There's much more personal information in a few month of search logs than that.
- bd 18y agoExactly. It's kind of like nuclear-test-ban once you already have supercomputer simulations that make real world tests unnecessary. After all, it's just 33 bits you need to identify a person. http://33bits.org/about/ http://33bits.org/about/