Google now lets you password-protect the page that shows all your searches
theverge.com
theverge.com
If you ever wondered what the deal with Enoch Root is, this book explains it. Quite well too, I think.
Also his idea of a purdah as an identifier is something I think society will eventually need to come up with to address what happens with new states of identity.
Although, comically I wasn’t willing to spend a few cents back when it was a few cents and certainly not willing to spend $15 now.
What you'd ideally want is a source of cryptographically strong random numbers and some storage.
If storage is cheap, you should have lots of storage, and then you can mint as many keys (including persistent public identity keys) as you like, indexed by context. This is preferable.
If storage is very expensive you can't afford to do that, you should mint one long-term symmetric key, never given to anybody, and then do the same trick that's inside cheap FIDO devices to mint key pairs, then encrypt the private half with the symmetric key and context, so that you can give both halves to relying parties. If played back in the correct context you can decrypt your private key again. You incur considerable practical inconveniences but you do keep key privacy and security guarantees from the above approach.
Today some places will issue you with a single long term identity key bound to your legal identity. Which is useful but (intentionally) lacks privacy guarantees, and, since it's an external device, you can lose it.
The Orphan Yatima (and presumably also the ordinary children conceived in what amounts to the "natural" way for Polis Citizens) in Greg Egan's novel "Diaspora" has public key crypto inside. Once the polis concludes that Yatima has personhood, it seals their cryptographic key management so that nothing anybody else can do (short of destroying the polis physically) can tamper with it. Yatima can prove they are Yatima, if they want, and nobody else can ever impersonate them.
Because our culture/society fundamentally lacks the understanding of security that you and I do.
Education needs to adapt for the modern times. Media literacy, CS fundamentals, and a basic understanding of how the Internet works should all be learned well before college. If we don't have a shared cultural understanding about the way we exist relative to technology, I fear we are destined to become enslaved by it.
I think they just hold the same information as is written in the passport, in which case it does little but to avoid the need to use OCR for entering passport data into a computer system. (Well, ignoring that bad actors might find a way to read your passport's data at a distance.)
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/biometric-passpor...
-- the universe
It it established Google keeps "shadow" behavioral data that isn't accessible to users?
I'm sure they have some in other systems to some degree (i.e logging).
I just did a takeout for my location history (which I keep off) and it was empty.
But this change isn't much different from the other sensitive pages that demand re-authentication.
It should do that "no, you need to actually type your password" thing.
If you autofill your passwords via the browser, you probably don't think very much about privacy in the first place and password-protect the history page won't change much.
> It should do that "no, you need to actually type your password" thing.
Yeah, that'd be awesome for us who use password managers and set our passwords to be at least 32 characters long with special characters.
Please developers, never ever disable pasting passwords, it worsens security.
Even worse is if you make me type them on a phone[1], I am actively hating you. As in I am actively going to recommend we switch from whatever products you support.
[1] Because you purposefully broke web app so you can drive your app usage.
There's the related behavior where autofill doesn't clear the "something happened" check, so you have to add a character and remove it again to tickle the "missing field" JS checks into recognizing you typed something in.
What's wrong with auto-filling passwords?
But realistically, our setups are not the norm, in any place I've seen at least, from small personal setups to huge enterprises. Most people leave their computers with the defaults, and leave their computers unlocked all the time.
For them to use a dedicated password manager is a step up as password managers are built for security. The password manager built-in in your browser is meant for comfort. Password managers usually hides the passwords, removes them from the clipboard, auto-locks themselves after X minutes and more, while the strongest protection the browser password managers have is a master password.
So yes, probably for you it's fine, because you have other measures. But for most others, especially casual users, they don't have those measures and would be better off with a password manager.
Plus, offices generally have some sort of physical security preventing anyone from just walking through, and with open offices, it's pretty damn obvious when someone is using a computer belonging to another person.
Hotdesking to the rescue.
This is about security, not privacy. I lock my machine whenever I'm not in front of it, and require password/fingerprint to unlock.
And why do you require a password/fingerprint to unlock your machine? Is that not to preserve your privacy or is there some other reason?
That would be a delicious egg-on-face from the Google that pushed the 'aggressively ignore autocomplete=off on password fields' in Chrome because they thought that no real web site should have a reason to disable that.
We sent you this ad because we know you like hentai and “we asked Google to look through their data and show ads to hentai watchers” is a distinction without a difference when it’s equally uncomfortable that Google is looking at this information as it would be for Google’s clients.
I hope you have some information backing this claim.
For two, you can look up Google’s history of fighting back against court orders to access customer data. There wouldn’t be much point in that if this data was just “available to advertisers and government agencies”. Except maybe PR, which going back to point one.
For three, Snowden’s leaks revealed that the NSA installed fiber taps in Google datacenters to steal this data, precisely because Google wouldn’t give it to the NSA without a valid warrant. Google has since publicly claimed that they have encrypted all traffic on their internal network.
“Google sells your data!” is an old meme, but a tired one, and not one that stands up to inspection.
Does that mean much? Google would not be so foolish as to hand over everything at once, when they could do something else that allows them to sell it, or the use of it, again and again. They doubtless have a hundred ways, each more clever than the last, to sell it again and again. Since they control the whole apparatus, they can make full use of all your history at all times without revealing to advertisers anything that would allow Google to be bypassed next time.
So, Google's pledge is simply that every use of your data will necessarily involve paying Google again. And, anything at all that can help Google uniquely identify you with activity anywhere online certainly is collected into your file, the use of to be dold for what the traffic will bear.
Your ISP has a different set of incentives.
> Your ISP has a different set of incentives.
Indeed, ISPs are known to wholesale sell their user’s traffic history.
I'm not even saying that Google is selling it, I'm just arguing that it makes practical sense to me to have that assumption from a privacy standpoint.
Appreciate the feature but I don't want Google to have anything to do with my searches, password-protected or otherwise.
That's actually very easy to fix, don't use Google for your searches.
Otherwise, obviously, the property you're using to do X with, will be able to see that you're doing X, otherwise it wouldn't work in the first place.
Not sure what you're arguing for/against here really.
Under "Activity controls," click Manage your activity controls. Turn off the activity you don’t want to save.
fixed that for you
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465
Disclosure: I work for Google
What about all the anonymized data, it's surely not removed either, because you don't even have a link to the original author of that data anymore.
I think we both know that Google doesn't actually delete the search history (as how could Google Trends work then?), but instead they make sure the history is not associated to any user anymore. Which is disassociation rather than deletion.
I think it's correct to call this a deletion. Assuming the anonymization happened correctly (for this argument, let's say it did).
Namely, I disagree that the anonymized constitutes "your data" now and it was disassociated at the time of inclusion of the "pool". You may have generated it, but there's no way of knowing that you or anyone else generated that data. There's literally no way to show proof of claim for that dataset - otherwise it not anonymous.
Because of that, I think Google can claim they are deleting your data accurately while still maintaining usage analytics.