Google crumbles its cookies
p2pnet news | freedom:- Cookies are, “used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts,” says the Wikipedia.
In other words, they’re capsules of extremely valuable information which can be used for all kinds of purposes, not merely to guide advertisers and marketeers.
Just about everyone uses them for one reason or another and as things stand, Google keeps its cookies for more than 30 years, a fact that’s seriously disquieting to people and organisations with privacy concerns.
However, Google now says it’s to dramatically crumbling the length of time it keeps your cookies to a mere two years.
Looks good, at first blush, but it’s little more than an empty gesture.
“The expiry date only comes into force two years after the last time a surfer visits a Google page,” notes the says MediaGuardian.co. “If an individual continues to visit Google’s websites, the cookies will continue to renew themselves indefinitely.”
And what’ll happen to inormation gathered in cookies stored by companies associated with, or owned by, Google?
The story goes on:
A report earlier this year from Privacy International placed Google bottom of its online privacy rankings and claimed the company had an institutional hostility to privacy.
Google responded vociferously to the accusations, pointing to its efforts to overturn a White House attempt to access data on millions of internet users.
But recent concern over the use of cookies has been spurred by the company’s $3.1bn (£1.5bn) acquisition of DoubleClick, an internet advertising firm which has been controversial in the past for its use of invasive techniques.
The Federal Trade Commission, America’s financial regulator, is conducting an anti-trust investigation into the deal.
Also See:
MediaGuardian.co – Google yields to privacy campaign, July 17, 2007
online privacy rankings – Google flunks major privacy study, July 11, 2007
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July 17th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Google not only tracks you by your cookies but your ip as well. It’s a common practice of mine to delete cookies on a regular basis. My ip is changed often enough they’ll have to come up with another way to track my history. Maybe like the click habits sense that has been announced it is possible to continue to id those that use it’s services.
Google is beginning to lose it’s usefullness to me. It is so crowded with ads that I don’t want and have to weed through to find the material, buried far in the back of the search, that I do want that the pain to use it is rapidly overcoming it’s benefits. I am beginning to long for a search engine that gives me what I ask for and not sideline guess at what I might be interested in buying. If I was interested in buying, I wouldn’t be searching for data on the net; I’d be in a bookstore or related store that had what I was interested in.
The ads that so ruin media today has become a pest beyond my ability to say just how much I despise them. With news of forecasts that say ad budgets will increase for the internet, I can see it will only get worse. I will be certain to ignore those that advertise as products I won’t spend on because of the intrusiveness that is neither wanted nor desired. These ad companies have become a pest industry beyond all comprehension.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I’ve set SearchMash as the default search engine in Opera and I’ve pretty much abandoned Googly.
Pretty much the same results (AFAIK, it’s their own new engine; in Beta).