Comments on: Google’s Real Goal Behind All Their Free APIs

By: Michi

Michi — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:17:40 +0000

I believe I declined (80% sure).

By: Sameer Alibhai

Sameer Alibhai — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:43:09 +0000

PS… I noticed you have both Google Ads and Google Analytics on this site too… Did you agree to allow them to “share your data between services”?

By: Sameer Alibhai

Sameer Alibhai — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:41:37 +0000

You are so right about privacy being gone. Another freaky thing is the advent of GPS + Internet-connected phones (think Iphone and its feature to publish on twitter where you are). Also see Maps.live.com with their “aerial view” which is surprisingly good. I cannot imagine that we really have any privacy any more.. Cash is becoming obsolete and replaced with plastic. Too much to think about that its actually scary so maybe I just wont think about it and go back to bed…..

By: Michi

Michi — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:04:00 +0000

You are right, but even then, they can still slowly gather small bits of browsing history together and yield correlations. For example, maybe they’ll notice that there are actually higher click rates on “computer” related keyword ads on visitors that frequent both reddit and digg (purely an example). Or maybe they could map together that people who read my blog are more likely to also visit sites x, y, and z. Eventually they might figure out that there is are subsets of populations that visit specific sites that ALSO visit other sites that are interested in different things. For example, even though everybody is visiting CNN (making the ads fairly generic), they might notice that you showed up on another site that correlates to technically savvy users… So even if they can’t track you very well, they tracked the 1M other people very closely and now can guess at your disposition. They have SO MUCH data and end-users that even the smallest correlations could yield big returns.

By: imma

imma — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:21:48 +0000

This type of tracking won’t work well on me – my cookies get cleared automatically when i close my browser (3-4 times a day generally).
Though Google do get to track my web usage through Web History
( I get to see that too, though ).
It does sound like this will work for normal(or at least a large proportion of) browser use, though & the side effects are rather nice so far.
– imma