Googling yourself now leads to personal privacy controls
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
"Hello Aaron Smith. Do you want to learn what we know about you? By the way your wife already knows about Sarah."
They don't include the really interesting stuff, like what Adwords CPM campaigns you've been counted as an impression or conversion for—but that's more for technical reasons than honesty ones (ads run on massive realtime OLTP pipelines that just increment counters in memory to record you; the system just doesn't have time to record a whole {campaign ID, your ID} tuple.)
But all that being said, the stated idea above—showing the account-privacy offer to anyone Googling the name of X on a computer X has logged into, even if they are not presently logged into it—would be a privacy leak. (And don't get me wrong, Google cooperates with authoritarian top-down privacy violation, but that doesn't mean they don't do everything they can to prevent peer privacy violation.)
Someone could go up to a computer you've used, type your name, and thereby discover what your email address is. Imagine if there was a guaranteed way to "sniff" someone's contact information off a public computer they just used, where even clearing the browser's data completely wouldn't help—that's a big target for both stalkers and social engineers.
There are various justifications along a whole spectrum of legitimacy for not disclosing everything. Does disclosing the way your data is analyzed reveal trade secrets? What to do about data involving two or more parties (how many times x has viewed y's facebook profile, etc)?
I get that there are reasons why they can't show us the content of that data, but the fact that we will never know the true extent of what is even being collected or how it will be used...that still makes me uneasy.
† I'm not sure what they learn about people that doesn't come from those people making requests to Google. Like, even Google Analytics makes requests to Google—and they don't have any equivalent functionality that will take server logs in place of client beacons. This almost seems like a secret/implicit principle of Google, that's somehow persisted since the "Don't Be Evil" days: only attempt to find out things about people by asking those people directly, rather than by learning it from someone else.
You missed his point: Google assembles that dossier even if you don't have an account, but without an account you can't go to google.com/accont and see it.
Of course, you can't influence it either way since google won't let you request a deletion, so it's kind of moot either way.
People know that Google depends on their data, so Google depends on a certain level of trust being present so that people are willing to use Google's products. It seems likely that being more transparent will lead to more trust.
It's good and bad I guess. But definitely helps to build trust.
app-specific ones are usually under a little gear-thingy on the right-hand side.
The downside of this is that searching your own search history is not as useful.
> search results biased by my previous queries
would that have to be a bad thing? I understand it prioritises search results near you area, or remembers things like whether you're more into the country or the animal when you search for [turkey].
I think concerns about the online filter bubble can be a bit overblown. We have the same thing in real life too: e.g. I like to hang out with people who share my world view rather than seek out those with opposing views.
Well I would like to research the arguments from both sides in order to form an informative opinion. If my search engine does not give me that but instead shows me only results I would agree with initially on the top, what's the point of using a search engine in the first place?
That's an example of a well-known cognitive bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Being biased is not a good thing if you care about knowing what is true and what isn't.
As an example, someone who is into astrology will have less opportunities to learn that it's all bullshit if Google continues to do this disservice to people.
With years, we grow intellectually. When I was about 13 or 14, I was interested in astrology too. It would be stupid if those idiotic years would still haunt me in my google searches.
I use DDG as my primary search provider (and have now for years) it works quite well, has bang searches, and just added date-based search filtering, my most-wanted feature.
I avoid use of Google products where logged in, generally, simply because getting social nags etcetera when doing other shit is annoying as fuck. Plus bubbling and filtering.
There are still Google tools I use. Scholar, Books (though Worldcat is better for general "who published stuff), and NGram Viewer.
Otherwise, I've been sliding from Google services for quite a while.
Worth noting: you need to disable that even if you're logged out because shadow profiles are enabled by default.
Also worth noting: even if you have a completely clean Google history like I do (which is a pain in the ass because you have to delete the data for every single day one by one), they keep the data for six months, so if you turn on the personalized crap in less than six months, they'll already have some data available to personalize your content right away.
I tried turning it on for a month just to see if I'm missing something by having their personalized crap turned off, but nope. Their services were even more useful and kind of creepy in whole different ways (for example, when I join the new WiFi network and open up YouTube, it's going to recommend me videos that Google tracked that people watched from that IP. Checked it a couple of times because I couldn't believe that they would do that.)
Basically only thing I've left is the YouTube history and search. Sadly the YouTube history is a bit useless since you can't search through it.
Edit: To be clarify, I'm saying this suggests there may be a bug either with the site or Ghostery.