gut;586581 wrote:But one might also argue if you are going to do nothing to police it and then hide behind privacy laws to "protect" those breaking the law you are complicit in the crime.
They aren't protecting anyone, because nobody is breaking the law ON their site. That's the problem.
People are searching for things, sometimes for benevolent reasons. Someone writing a report on precautions against hacking may search the term "how to hack a yahoo email account." I once did such a report. Found myself able to view what goes on on numerous unscrupulous sites, forums, blogs, etc. Now, I wasn't doing anything illegal, and I actually included in my report some of the things I found by just using a search engine. I expressed the value of knowing how you are protected on different sites, and knowing when you aren't. I told how easy it was for anyone to access basic hacking information and how they can protect themselves.
Now, Google doesn't know why I searched what I did. The nice thing is, they recognize that they don't know why I searched what I did, so they don't act like I'm guilty of something.
That's not protecting the guilty. That's protecting everyone in the public equally, since the search engine can simply see what people search and what sites they visit. What a person does on that site is not something Google can know (unless Google owns the site, as there are tools you can use to track people's actions on your own site).
Another point worth noting is that Google handles such enormous traffic on a daily basis that in order to police it by non-automated means would require an obscene amount of manpower. Google currently uses over 1 million servers. Think about the monthly bandwidth; it's staggering.
Copyrighted material needs to be protected by the copyright owners and the authorities. Google already does a considerable amount to ensure fraud doesn't go on through their AdWords and AdSense campaigns, so it isn't as though they're making no effort. However, there is only so much a company can be held responsible to do when it comes to other people's actions.
ytownfootball;586584 wrote:Tell me again why Google saves all their users search history?
A variety of reasons:
- Trend data can be cross-referenced by geo-location
- Two different search terms can be connected if there is a lot of overlap
- Contextual advertising (showing ads on pages that are relevant to the user, based on their search history)
- If necessary, Google's algorithms can be altered, based on new developments arising in the way people search (for example, if the same people who are searching a term that allows them to view some people's cPanel logins, and they're ALSO searching a particular website search term, then Google can make the connection and plug the whole)
It's not just Google. A LOT of people track user activity on their sites. Hell, Justin probably does. (Sorry, Justin!
)
