Feds asked to probe Google's leaky search terms The FTC is considering a complaint that Google conceals the fact that users' search terms are handed over to the websites they visit. Christopher Soghoian, a well-known privacy campaigner and former FTC employee, charges that the dominant search engine's privacy policy does not explain that referral headers - which include …
As others have said, it isn't Google it's the browser.
OK, Google could use POST rather than GET so that the search term wouldn't appear in the URI.
Perhaps someone should warn this guy that every site he clicks a link on tells the new site where he came from. In his world, that must constitute stalking!!!!
What an annoying, attention grabbing tit
As I'm sure others will point out, there's the refControl add-on for Firefox that allows users to easily adjust what referer info gets sent on a domain by domain basis if necessary. Or you could use Privoxy or use a different search engine (ixquick, scroogle, duckduckgo etc).. well you get the idea.
Who is going to be going through referer (sic) headers for PI when there is a million other ways to get more and better info.
I think this guy works for a specially trained Google squad who raise spurious non-issues to distract people while Google nip round the back and nick all your spoons.
Nothing like incorrect pedantry.. due to typos in the original spec written by Phillip Hallam-Baker and promulgation of said typo, that header is (correctly) the 'referer' header.
When it was spotted, no-one cared enough to fix it, and it was decide to blame the french:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1995JanApr/0107.html
Read the actual complaint (conveniently linked to in the article) before commenting. The complainant "is a Washington, DC based Graduate Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University." and he does mention how to get the major browsers to stop sending the http referrer info (in this case "major browsers" does NOT include IE and Safari).
More interesting is:
"For more than ten years, Google has tracked the links that users click on from the search results page. During the search engine’s first few years, this was done by redirecting all clicks from the search engine results page through a script on Google’s servers, before then redirecting the users’ browser to the server hosting the content they actually wished to view."
That's something that's news to me. I stopped using Yahoo way back when they started obscuring the search results making you click on yahoo links which then redirect you to the target website. Anyway before I started using Firefox and the refcontrol addon I had always copy+paste the cleartext links that Google provide in their results - which is a good thing if the above claim is true.
"Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a Google search box, not only will they receive back the most relevant results, but that Google will keep private whatever information users communicate absent a compelling reason," the firm claimed to court.
Most Google users I know trust very little about the search engine, and certainly not those two items.
As many others have said browsers pass on referrrer info! Also happens with Yahoo, Bing etc.
Sorry for strong language, but the guy is a moron! It's been like this for decades.
Work arounds:
- use Google secure i.e. https://google.com
- turn of referring (For instructions, Google for a simple tutorial on how to do it in Firefox - it takes like 2 mins)
- Copy and paste the URL
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