Google Web History helps find what you've seen

Stephen Withers
Monday, 23 April 2007 05:34

Your IT - Home IT

Applications that run on your own computer to save or index the pages you've visited (eg, BrowseBack and Slogger) can be used by others to see where you've been, providing they have physical access to your computer. Anyone who manages to discover your Google credentials can use Google Web History to follow your online tracks.

Is that a problem? Maybe not. But behaviour considered normal or at least acceptable under one regime may be regarded as deviant by its successor.

And the legal discovery process can already turn up far more information than an organisation would like to reveal. It might be disadvantageous if your opponent learned that one of your employees visited a particular web page at a certain time.

Web History is an opt-in service, and it is possible to pause it, delete individual entries or wipe the entire history, but it's unlikely people will bother. How often do you clean out the cookies stored by your browser?

For the conspiracy theorists, Web History does provide an incentive for people to stay logged into Google, allowing the company to get a better picture of who you are and what you are interested in. They would probably also point out that one of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's major research interests at Stanford was data mining.

If you're planning to use multiple Google accounts to keep different activities separate, think again. One user has already reported Web History switching between accounts without warning.

This could affect the efficiency of Google searches, as the user's Web History is now used as an input to the page ranking process.