Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Google Tracking
From: Michał Jęczalik <michal () jeczalik com>
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:51:49 +0200 (CEST)
On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:
Now, correct me if I am wrong here, but I would like to hear from anyone who utilizes Google Analytics and believes this is not the case. Does the EULA suggest that Google is not tracking users across the entire Internet? Just a random though I had. Maybe this is widely known and everyone has taken proactive measures to hide this data from Google already. It is merely as simple as blocking the domain. Maybe there is a more elegant way to do it?
Well, for sure Google and its services are designed to collect data about you, but I'm not sure if this is the most important case by now. Of course, in a few years they would be able to issue your full dossier - they know your mail, they know your browsing history (Analytics), they know your search queries (Search History), they know your friends (Orkut), they know what search queries are in your particular attention (Alerts), they know your tasks and stuff (Calendar), they know which sites you run (webmaster tools - note that this service doesn't provide much more information than you can get from your webserver logs, but people use it, and they are somehow encouraged to do this, because webmaster tools is the only way to submit a sitemap! Why it's not as simple as robots.txt - why not simply use a fixed filename, just like robots.txt - if Googlebot is able to get information from this file, why not /sitemap.xml? Tell me one good reason against it. :). Well, let's hope that they are fair and they never ever use it against you. :) But this 'big brother' scenario is not the case in my opinion. At least not now. The case is to sell more Adwords. Why would you buy an Adwords box? Because you don't rank well in a normal search. If your site has high rank, you probably won't. The goal is to wipe out all SEO techniques. Some of them are banned right now - all those link-farms, fake web directories and so on, but there are still some more, which are much harder to track - i.e. presell pages. And google's goal is to put a couple (previously impossible to link) of things together. They must know who runs the site, how the site is ranked by visitors (probably sites that rank high, but have high bounce rate and/or short average visit times, are a subject to some manual inspection), and which queries is webmaster trying to rank well. Now they know it already. They have webmaster tools, analytics and alerts. Perhaps queries used in alerts are checked against sites linking to sites that are in webmaster tools and information gathered such way is used to improve the search algoritm. -- Samotnik Michal Jeczalik, +48.603.64.62.97 _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Google Tracking Kristian Erik Hermansen (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Cyberheb (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Peter Besenbruch (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Michał Jęczalik (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Peter van den Heuvel (Sep 16)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Google Tracking Throwaway1 () columbus rr com (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking php0t (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Valdis . Kletnieks (Sep 17)
- Re: Google Tracking Marcin Wielgoszewski (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Thomas Coppi (Sep 15)
- Re: Google Tracking Cyberheb (Sep 15)