Google Launches Web History; Huge Privacy Concerns
April 19th, 2007 at 6:26 PM (18 years ago) by Matt FreedmanGoogle announced today that they have launched Google Web History.
How it works is that it’s attached to your Google Account, and when you sign-up to the Web History service, and have the Google Toolbar, with PageRank enabled, installed in your browser, all the pages you visit will be recorded into your Google Account, for you to be able to easy search it later. You can imagine that people might think that Google will be going through the websites you visit. I don’t think they will, I trust Google, to a point. So, as you can see, this new service has some serious Privacy Concerns, no matter what their Privacy Policy says.
Their idea behind it was so that you’ll be able to search through all the pages you’ve visited, since most people visit hundreds of sites per day, you’re likely to forget some of them, so this way it’ll help you remember that good site that you didn’t Favourite/Bookmark/Write down (too old school 😛 ).
Will you be signing up for this service?
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2 Responses to “Google Launches Web History; Huge Privacy Concerns”
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April 20th, 2007 at 7:12 AM | Quote Comment
No, because if I want to record my history (and I don’t, cause i already consider it a privacy risk) there is a perfectly good history feature in my browser already. And even if I want to look at my history from another computer, I can probably find what I was looking for again in 5 minutes of searching anyway.
April 21st, 2007 at 7:14 PM | Quote Comment
Good point. I don’t plan on signing up for it either. My browsing history is emptied regularly, too.
Web History is now also combined with your Search History, which is also a privacy concern. It’s bad enough that Google keeps internal records of searches (or, at least, I imagine they do), but then having those searches to search through. No thanks. Might be useful for some, but just Favourite/Bookmark any sites you find interesting…