Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tinalumfoil | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tinalumfoil

How to reverse the damages:

1) Go to https://history.google.com/history/

2) Select the offending searches

3) Click delete on the top right (then click delete again)

View on HN

Better yet, delete the entire search history and turn it off.

Why don't people just visit in incognito mode in the first place?

Because that's annoying, history is useful sometimes, and logging in to multiple times to multiple sites is a chore.

Edit: grammar

Not visit all sites in incognito. Visit this specific site in incognito, since it has "Ruin my history" in the title.

It depends. I have multiple windows (incognito and normal) containing many tabs. It takes copying the URL, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V, Enter.

History is important, but the site is called "ruinmysearchhistory.com". I visit websites I know with my normal window, the rest is mostly in incognito and if it's something I want to remember, I'll make sure to include it (i.e: visit it in normal mode, Evernote, Bookmarks, email to myself, etc).

You could just 'Right Click->Open in Incognito' instead of manually copying the URL, at least in Chrome.

Firefox and Pale Moon both have "Open Link in New Private Window".

IE has some kind of private browsing option as well, but I don't know what would be the equivalent way to invoke it.

I do that when I'm already in incognito mode, not in normal mode because I don't know where the tab will be open (I have multiple incognito windows and I like to know where each tab is/will be).

I google things I don't want in my history in incognito mode. The question is: does it prevent being tracked by Google?

i do that too but i'm pretty sure my browser and my isp send enough information to google to perfectly identify me.

Not only that, you are being tracked in many other places. See the "Show more controls":

> https://www.google.com/settings/accounthistory

I have a handy page I knocked up that I use periodically to minimise my Google footprint:

http://www.jaruzel.com/How-Much-Does-Google-Know-About-Me

I thought I'd been careful with the settings but I think at some point I must have missed something, fucking android, last google phone I buy full stop.

You could've bought another phone instead of posting.

Even better yet, don't keep a logged-in session for these tracking-giants. I only ever log onto gmail in an incognito window (and if I had Facebook, same there). On my mobile device it's a different story, so even more better yet, also turn the search-history off (you're using DDG anyway, right ^_^)

There are bigger problems and one's which put people at serious risk when forensics investigators don't know how fragile the search history implementation really is:

http://thefutureisastephenkingnovel.com/badforensics/

You'll note in the search history that the referrer is still there so from a forensics perspective it's known the history was populated via CSRF. That can be bypassed. Google has indicated they aren't going to fix the problem.

I'm pretty sure Google won't actually delete any of them from their internal profile of you though.

By now, they probably filter the array from the history.

They actually do delete.

How do you know this for a fact?

If the roles were reversed would you delete? Or would you just like and say you did?

If I were representing a big, well known company with lots of money to give out in settlements, I'd be much more likely not to say anything than to bother lying.

That's not universal. When a company screws up, an individual rarely goes down for it. The impact of the crime is often absorbed by many people (or no one).

If I were in charge of a publicly traded company I most definitely wouldn't want a scandal like that lurking beneath the surface. It would absolutely leak.

The existence of classified programs that remain classified and unknown for years is evidence against this oft-used argument.

The only reason you know of the existence of these programs is because they leaked...

Which would almost certainly imply there exist programs that have never leaked...

ie, datasets that are maintained and properly encrypted in a 'CEUE' (Create Encrypt, Update, Encrypt) app.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

I can happily endorse the company's public statements on this subject: personal data will be deleted within the timeframes specified (for obvious technical and that's-a-bad-idea reasons, it's not instant). Part of SRE's function is to arrange for SLAs to be met, including deletion SLAs.

from any data warehouse as well?

It is fully deleted.

does the data get sent anywhere else before it gets deleted?

Dont worry the NSA keeps a copy for you just in case.

Dropbox's #1 Competitor

Backhaul as a Service

Yes. The only way to delete things at scale is to ship them over the network to a dedicated cluster of machines running a proprietary fork of /dev/null. Google has invested man decades into this system and holds numerous patents on the design.

Why wouldn't they just use MongoDB? It's already web-scale.

What's an SRE?

"Site Reliability Engineer", I think.

What matters much more than whether Google deletes is whether some other group has access to and stores that data before Google deletes it. Almost assuredly the answer is yes. Search history is a tremendously powerful tool and insightful data point for anyone. There's no way government groups aren't using it. It takes up almost no room for storage, either.

> "Search history is a tremendously powerful tool and insightful data point for anyone."

Can confirm. Near the end of internships I use my browser history, and mostly the search history contained in that, to figure out what I've done so I don't forget anything in the report. It's a near perfect way to tell what I've been up to any day.

> Almost assuredly the answer is yes.

[citation required]. Google goes through great lengths to make sure that's not the case, both technically with legal defense against overreaching subpoenas.

No they don't. They just don't show it to you. They hide your search list, but it's still included in your Google profile.

I was very pleased to find that, at some point in the past, I saved myself from this situation. When I completed step 1, I was greeted by a nice blank list. I clicked over to my settings and found the following good news:

>Your searches and browsing activity (paused)

Do people actually use Google Search while being logged-in in Google?

Umm, yes?

Of course. Most people aren't going to logout of Gmail when they want to do a Google search.

Who ever logs out?

Me since I rarely log in in the first place.

I only googlog in to my association's "shared account" and log out straight away.

Also I mainly use DuckDuckGo and bang !g only when needed.

Privacy actually matter to me...

DDG is great! I've been using it for almost six months straight now! I'm glad we're not contributing to the monoculture! Keep it up!

Why do you even login?

Gmail? Google Apps for Business? Youtube? Google Analytics?

For YouTube you don't need to log in; the rest I don't use.

And YouTube is actually better when you're not logged in, because ironically the suggestions are better. Logged out you get to see the sidebar with videos related to the current video you're watching (which makes sense), logged in you get a sidebar filled with "suggestions" of shit that have nothing to do with what you're looking at, instead some vague mix of topics you watched last week.

It can even become rather offensive, IMHO.

I don't always watch videos because I agree with the uploader or audience. I can watch a racist dude rant because it fascinates me, to laugh at them, or because I wanted a reminder that such people actually exist. When the (not logged-in) sidebar with related videos then is filled with more racist trash, I'm like "fine, makes sense. related videos. okay. not clicking, but there they are".

Another time I had been watching videos on my Android phone (afaik the YouTube app doesn't let you be not logged-in) on a subject related to feminism. I don't use the app that often and I can't recall what the clips had been about (but probably nothing very umm "high brow"). So, the next week I open the YouTube app, find a whole bunch of "suggested" videos about apparently people calling radio shows and "guy tells those feminists what's what!" or "this guy's reaction puts feminist in place!" trash. If it had been "related" to a video I had just watched, I'd be like "fine, makes sense". But in this case, whatever I did was a week ago and apparently made Google believe these are my interests. Notice how that's a bit more personal? "related to current video" versus "related to this guy's interests". So I'm really offended and think "fuck you and mind your own business". If your algorithm is that stupid, maybe you just shouldn't use it and don't even for a moment pretend that your prejudiced joke of a "profile" is of me and I don't want to be associated with it. Ugh.

I don't, but frankly Google isn't in my cookie whitelist so their cookies never get stored beyond using a Google service (like YouTube or, uh, I actually don't think I use another Google service).

Absolutely! The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful. I also see more relevant adverts, and less generic ones, which makes them much less annoying. People of a certain technical mindset have a knee-jerk "Privacy! Surveillance! Evil!" response, tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario, where the rest of the Internet is populated entirely by malicious bad actors, seeking to harm users. The reality is much more nuanced: most of the rest of the Internet neither knows nor cares about you; the majority of the rest are trying to provide useful services to improve their users lives, sometimes trying to make money by doing this; a minority are bad, either trying to steal from or scam you.

In terms of Google search, the fact it retains context is actually useful most of the time, and the edge cases where it is harmful are easily avoided by countermeasures like logging out, using DuckDuckGo, installing Tor or switching to incognito mode.

> the majority of the rest are trying to provide useful services to improve their users lives

And if the ads or results on subjects you're interested in just happen to take a line against what you personally believe on the subject, and instead happen to tout an agenda that benefits the (right-wing/capitalist/US-centric) corporate or political interests of Google and FB and the like, is it still just about improving your life?

> tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario,

With the possibility of a racist American president looming, search results which could signal one's ethnicity become a valid concern.

> The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful.

Google gets my approx location from my IP whether I like it or not, which is really all the targeted results I need.

What else is there? There is so little remaining of the actual web search engine that Google used to be 10-15 years ago, I only ever use it for the typical "local" queries that indeed benefit from knowing what city I'm in.

All the other stuff I need to find on the web, if I were to trust Google it might as well not exist. It used to be that any keyword-combination you could imagine that would (reasonably) appear on some website somewhere, would get you that website, some others and a bunch of spam. Google was good at sorting the spam downwards, but if you wanted, you could browse it (then about 10 years ago they limited this to max 1000 results even if they reported millions).

Today, you get nothing. You get a bunch of results that vaguely match the topic of your keywords. Your search keywords that happen to appear are bolded, but that's just a visual effect now, suggesting they tried looking for all your keywords and this was just the best they could find. Except bullshit because I remember the old web, it was smaller, but it was still incomprehensibly gigantic, and already everything was there, and Google could find it under half a second, with their old tech. (where did all the web go?)

So let's be honest, they're not really looking. It's like an annoying salesman, you enter a shop, ask for a specific thing (which they may or may not have), and the salesman tries to convince you that the thing they want to sell you is the thing you were really looking for.

This is what your "targeted" "suggestions" are doing to you. They're targeted to suggest you that you want that something which they want to show you.

Which is, admittedly, all sorts of useful for "local" searches, which is truly the only thing I use Google "web" search for nowadays. Otherwise it's DuckDuckGo which can send me straight to the websearch that has my answer (discogs, wikipedia, various image search engines..). It's not as good as Google used to be (although back then I had my own tools for the meta searches), but it's also not worse than what Google is now.

oh and I didn't even touch on the part where you said that better targeted relevant ads are less annoying. The idea that ads can be "relevant" comes from the ad networks, but there's no such thing. If it was relevant it'd be a search result. If it requires payment to appear between your results, then either it is less relevant than its paid position would suggest (at the cost of another, by definition more relevant, result), or it actually is relevant and the fact that you seen it only because it was paid for means the engine is not actually doing every simple thing to show you the most relevant results, but actively hiding some. Sure this is a business model, what gets me about it is that Google one day used to be so much better than this and used that credit to build something trashy like this. If they were a new search engine nobody would give it a second look.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com