Second Google privacy video
Maile Ohye from Google is back, with a discussion on web history and personalization:
It’s the second in their video-series-of-indeterminate-length. You can see the first one here.
In this video, Maile shows you how you can see the history that’s associated with your Google account, pause recording of your Google activity, and delete specific records. This last is a useful trick if you’re shopping for a surprise birthday gift on a shared computer, although I would raise an eyebrow if my partner were suspiciously trolling through my search history.
Towards the end of this video, Maile points out that if you clear your history, the only data Google will be left with is what she described in the first video: your search query, IP address, and cookie.
From the first video: the info that gets retained in the Google logs
I may be really dense here, but isn’t the only difference between a cleared history and an uncleared one is that the uncleared one has your Google account, while the cleared one has your cookie? Here’s what Maile says about search history:
Your email and password don’t tell us personal stuff about you, like your name, age and occupation, so why do we need them? Well, in addition to helping us verify that you’re really you and not someone else who’s using your computer, your email and password allow us to maintain a record of your web history: the things you search for and the sites you visit.
Aha! Perhaps when you’re signed in they also track which sites you click through to! Maile doesn’t say whether they do, but she does say that you can check your history anytime. Just sign into Google and click ‘History’. I tried. Can’t do it. Maybe it doesn’t work in New Zealand. Here’s the full list of options available to me:
Did I miss it? Or is it not there? Have you been able to log into your history on Google? If so, what do you see? Also, what do you think of this new video?
