Interesting People mailing list archives
Google sends search terms to some web sites...
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 16:39:36 -0500
As I have often said, Google needs an external privacy Advisory Board like other big boys. djf
Begin forwarded message: From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb () cs columbia edu> Date: January 10, 2006 4:12:10 PM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Google sends search terms to some web sites... I just did a search on Google, and clicked on a link to news.com.com. Not surprisingly, the article I found was reasonable, appropriate, etc. And yes, I know that Google tracks my history. What I wasn't prepared for was this box on the web site: Welcome, Google user! If this story isn't what you're searching for, try these other News.com search results for ...: followed by a list of other possibly-relevant articles on that site. It took a few minutes of poking and cogitating before I realized what was going on: the Referer line generated by Google includes the query terms. Here, for example, is part of a tcpdump trace of a query on my last name:0x01d0: 0a52 6566 6572 6572 3a20 6874 7470 3a2f .Referer:.http:/ 0x01e0: 2f77 7777 2e67 6f6f 676c 652e 636f 6d2f / www.google.com/ 0x01f0: 7365 6172 6368 3f68 6c3d 656e 2671 3d62 search? hl=en&q=b 0x0200: 656c 6c6f 7669 6e26 6274 6e47 3d47 6f6f ellovin&btnG=Goo 0x0210: 676c 652b 5365 6172 6368 0d0a 436f 6f6b gle +Search..Cook 0x0220: 6965 3a20 5048 5053 4553 5349 443d 3531 ie:.PHPSESSID=51
Google did not invent Referer lines, and they can't be faulted for using them. They should, however, disclose this in their privacy policy. --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Google sends search terms to some web sites... David Farber (Jan 10)