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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

For most services, I agree to a ToS when I sign up. If I don't agree with the ToS, I can't create an account. (e.g.: dropbox, spotify, twitter, etc.)

But for Google, anyone can perform a search without agreeing to any ToS at all. What are the legal groundings and implications with regards to this?

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> Nevertheless, some courts have been willing to make browsewraps enforceable under certain circumstances. The more a site calls the user’s attention to the terms while browsing, the more likely a court will be to find it enforceable. On the other hand, if a service provider places the notice out of sight, such that a user must scroll down in order to see but not in order to use the service, courts will likely find such an arrangement does not show meaningful assent on the part of the user.

https://www.eff.org/wp/clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-t...

I believe they can only connect your searches if you are logged in while searching. Otherwise, of course they can collect data on anonymous searches but not ones that would be specific to you.

I hope I'm wrong.

I can see from an clean request to google.com that they set two cookies on your browser that are set to expires 6 months from the last request to google.com.

So assuming you use google more than once every 6 months they can keep a running log of your searches, and as soon as you log in to any google service with that cookie they will associate it with your account (I'm guessing).

If you clear your cookies reguarly or use incogneto it's not an issue.

Even without cookies, Google stores IP addresses and can use those to correlate searches.

IP address seems incredibly unreliable in this regard. What exactly is to be gained by associating it with an IP? If a company uses one external IP, are all my searches altered/bubbled by what everybody else in the company is querying?

There's a lot more information than just IP address they can use to distinguish you: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

You know that the ToS ONLY makes sense if you are signing up for Google's account right? How else are they going to link your searches to your "profile"?

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