Google has your logs (and all it took was a fart lighting video)
The non-obvious side of Google’s purchase of YouTube: Google now has access to the hit logs of every page that a YouTube video appears on, including LOTS of pages that were probably previously inaccessible to them. MySpace pages were probably going to get Google ads anyway, because of the big deal that happened there, but many others weren’t.
Add this to AdSense, the Google Web Accelerator, Google Web Analytics, and Google Maps, and that’s a lot of data being collected about browsing habits, and the number of sites you can browse without sending some data to Google has just dropped significantly.
Previously:
http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/30/flickr-pictures-web-beacons-and-a-modest-proposal/
http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/29/whats-the-big-fuss-about-ip-addresses/
http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/27/google-does-keep-cookie-and-ip-correlated-logs/
http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/26/does-google-keep-logs-of-personal-data/
http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/11/21/google-really-wants-your-logs/
http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/05/05/google-wants-your-logs/
http://www.aquick.org/blog/index.php?s=google&submit=Search
Tags: google, tracking, logs, surveillance
October 12th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Add google.com 0.0.0.0 to your hosts file and that should help a lot
October 12th, 2006 at 9:22 am
You’d have to do this for all of the Google domains, including youtube.com.
However, it’s probably sufficient to not accept the google cookie and configure your browser to not send the referer header by default (although this will break some things that stupidly depend on it).