full-disclosure - Re: Google Tracking

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Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:51:49 +0200 (CEST)
From: Michał Jęczalik <michal@...zalik.com>
To: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: Google Tracking

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:

> Now, correct me if I am wrong here, but I would like to hear from
> anyone who utilizes Google Analytics and believes this is not the
> case.  Does the EULA suggest that Google is not tracking users across
> the entire Internet?  Just a random though I had.  Maybe this is
> widely known and everyone has taken proactive measures to hide this
> data from Google already.  It is merely as simple as blocking the
> domain.  Maybe there is a more elegant way to do it?

Well, for sure Google and its services are designed to collect data about 
you, but I'm not sure if this is the most important case by now. Of 
course, in a few years they would be able to issue your full dossier - 
they know your mail, they know your browsing history (Analytics), they 
know your search queries (Search History), they know your friends (Orkut), 
they know what search queries are in your particular attention (Alerts), 
they know your tasks and stuff (Calendar), they know which sites you run 
(webmaster tools - note that this service doesn't provide much more 
information than you can get from your webserver logs, but people use it, 
and they are somehow encouraged to do this, because webmaster tools is the 
only way to submit a sitemap! Why it's not as simple as robots.txt - why 
not simply use a fixed filename, just like robots.txt - if Googlebot is 
able to get information from this file, why not /sitemap.xml? Tell me 
one good reason against it. :).

Well, let's hope that they are fair and they never ever use it against 
you. :)

But this 'big brother' scenario is not the case in my opinion. At least 
not now.

The case is to sell more Adwords.

Why would you buy an Adwords box? Because you don't rank well in a normal 
search. If your site has high rank, you probably won't. The goal is to 
wipe out all SEO techniques. Some of them are banned right now - all those 
link-farms, fake web directories and so on, but there are still some more, 
which are much harder to track - i.e. presell pages. And google's goal is 
to put a couple (previously impossible to link) of things together. They 
must know who runs the site, how the site is ranked by visitors (probably 
sites that rank high, but have high bounce rate and/or short average visit 
times, are a subject to some manual inspection), and which queries is 
webmaster trying to rank well. Now they know it already. They have 
webmaster tools, analytics and alerts. Perhaps queries used in alerts are 
checked against sites linking to sites that are in webmaster tools and 
information gathered such way is used to improve the search algoritm.

-- 
Samotnik Michal Jeczalik, +48.603.64.62.97

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