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[IP] more on Google sends search terms to some web sites...



Begin forwarded message:

From: Matt Grommes <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 10, 2006 4:59:05 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Google sends search terms to some web sites...
To be fair to Google, this is a News.com feature. They use the referer line to see that and display the message to keep you on their site in case the found article wasn't to your liking. Pretty clever actually. I've seen various sites highlight the words on their site that you searched for based on the referer line as well. 

But I agree that Google does need some kind of Privacy board.

Matt Grommes
www.mattorama.net


David Farber wrote:
As I have often said, Google needs an external privacy Advisory Board like other big boys. djf 
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 10, 2006 4:12:10 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Google sends search terms to some web sites...
I just did a search on Google, and clicked on a link to news.com.com.
Not surprisingly, the article I found was reasonable, appropriate, etc. 
And yes, I know that Google tracks my history.  What I wasn't prepared
for was this box on the web site:
    Welcome, Google user!
    If this story isn't what you're searching for, try these other
    News.com search results for ...:
followed by a list of other possibly-relevant articles on that site.
It took a few minutes of poking and cogitating before I realized what
was going on: the Referer line generated by Google includes the query
terms.  Here, for example, is part of a tcpdump trace of a query on my
last name:
0x01d0: 0a52 6566 6572 6572 3a20 6874 7470 3a2f .Referer:.http:/ 0x01e0: 2f77 7777 2e67 6f6f 676c 652e 636f 6d2f / www.google.com/ 0x01f0: 7365 6172 6368 3f68 6c3d 656e 2671 3d62 search? hl=en&q=b 0x0200: 656c 6c6f 7669 6e26 6274 6e47 3d47 6f6f ellovin&btnG=Goo 0x0210: 676c 652b 5365 6172 6368 0d0a 436f 6f6b gle +Search..Cook 0x0220: 6965 3a20 5048 5053 4553 5349 443d 3531 ie:.PHPSESSID=51 
Google did not invent Referer lines, and they can't be faulted for
using them.  They should, however, disclose this in their privacy
policy.
        --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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