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Comment by TomaszZielinski | Hacker News Reader

I disabled the history to make the attack surface smaller. Even if Google retains that data forever, if someone gains access to my account she won't be able to check my browsing history.

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Agreed. I think this is the biggest point missed by the article. Your privacy as far as Google is concerned may not improve, but your overall privacy will. It will be much harder for other parties to get to the data Google collected. Considering that other parties are much more harmful and can lead to real-world harm (death, imprisonment, etc.), I'd say turning off history absolutely increases privacy.

"Considering that other parties are much more harmful and can lead to real-world harm (death, imprisonment, etc.), I'd say turning off history absolutely increases privacy."

Those guys who can imprison you can easily get your data directly from Google. If Google doesn't hand it over to them for the asking, they'll get a warrant (assuming there's probable cause to suspect you of a crime).

I think blackmail/extortion would be a more realistic scenario. As you correctly stated disabling the Web History is probably a futile defense against law enforcement agencies of western countries but think about all the dictatorships or otherwise strongly authoritarian regimes that are the norm for most of the world. As Google pulled from the Chinese market AFAIK they are probably not as receptive to warrants from there. Then there are also most of the African countries and many Asian countries with a high degree of corruption, low to no political freedom and/or freedom of speech. Not to forget the Arab countries where staying logged in while a third party has access to your PC and pulls up your long term search history and figures out that you are gay and you're stoned to death because of that.

Well, this wouldn't just refer to law enforcement. But even for law enforcement in the US for example, I would much rather them have to get a warrant. 99 out of 100 times they will not have probable cause. Privacy increased.

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