Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default
In Google’s new system, referrer data will be blocked.
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This will not be the case for ads. Google told me they feel advertisers need to have this additional data, and that they felt passing along the referrer data in that case was important but still meeting the balancing.
Personally, I find this confusing. If you’re going to improve privacy, don’t leave an out for your paid advertisers. Improve it for your users. But the ability to allow advertisers to still perform landing page targeting was perhaps seen as too important to drop, for now.
I just quoted the parts that I found interesting of course. 10 to 1 odds that Google will never cut their customers (advertisers) off from the referer data. That’s their revenue butter after all.
In related news: After we learned that Facebook cookies always track us, I’ve taken a harder stance with cookies in general. All are now blocked by default and I only whitelist sites that I need an account for.
Yeah I am a little dis-concerned by Google and bubbling/tracking. (http://dontbubble.us/) So I am going to start using duckduckgo.com for searching for a while and see what happens. Google has become a utility almost like Electricity or Natural Gas. People use it constantly for stuff from dictionary to medical help.
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I hadn't heard of http://duckduckgo.com before - thanks for the head's up. I had been using bing.com since their Privacy Policy is a bit better than Google's.
But I just set Chromium's default search to DuckDuckGo so I'm all good now.>
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