More on what Google (and other search engines) know about you

Xeni Jardin 9:55 pm Mon Jan 30, 2006

Inquisitive geek Adam Fields asked,

1) "Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people
who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google
cookie value?"

2) "Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a
list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie
value?"

The Search author and Boing Boing "band manager" John Battelle relayed that question to a spokesperson at Google.

John says,

To [Google's] credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is 'yes.'

Link to post on Battelle's blog.

Adam has been posting some interesting related items on his blog, too — including this post, which explores how HTTP referrer headers can make it possible for third party websites to track your personally identifiable info: Link.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Search privacy challenge: show us the data, MSN, Yahoo, AOL
Can you foil search data trackers with crafty queries?
Google and other search engines log IP addresses. So what?

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