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Google Preaches On Privacy Again
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-09-25
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The search advertising company followed up an earlier video about general practices like the use of cookies and IP addresses to improve search results with another video about their personalization and privacy tools.
 | | Google Preaches On Privacy Again |  |
Google has taken to YouTube to spread the word about its care and feeding of people's search habits. A previous video discussed basic concepts of privacy back in August.
This time around, Google expounds on features contained in its Web History service. When enabled, people can view and search across the full text of the pages they have visited previously.
There are all kinds of reasons why someone may not want everything they browse to be recorded by Google in perpetuity. Government antitrust regulators looking at Google's proposed DoubleClick acquisition may disapprove of such a situation.
That brings us back to the latest video, where a Google support engineer talks about the deeper privacy features in Web History, with 'pause' and 'remove' being available to have Google stop recording, or lose something it had retained previously.
Web History also contributes to the way Google can tailor results to a degree for a given individual. A user has to be logged in to a Google account to get this type of result. Narrator Maile Ohye used my favorite example, 'bass', as something that can mean different things to different people.
Someone whose searches for bass end with them clicking on pages about music rather than fishing will probably see more music-related results in subsequent searches for bass.
It seems likely these outreach efforts on privacy will receive further mention this week. Google has a date with a Senate Judiciary subcommittee this week regarding its DoubleClick acquisition, and privacy promises to be a hot-button topic for publicity seeking Senators.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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