Scroogle warns about DoubleClick/AdSense cookies
If you absolutely don’t care about criticism on Google, don’t continue reading or don’t complain about political stuff;-)
Google might not be the worst thing on the planet, but my recent criticms have often been rejected to be speculative. Lately after the wikia search closed down, I have found out about scroogle scraper proxy, which is my choice for now. Now that I surf anonymously I can truely see how far personalized information can change Google’s search results. On this site I have found (besides several other funny and serious criticisms of Google), this information from March:
“This week Google began recording the web surfing behavior of everyone who visits any page that uses AdSense or DoubleClick. It happens as soon as the page loads — no clicking is required. Their new doubleclick.net cookie has a unique ID and is similar to the same sophisticated system that was developed over the last ten years for the google.com cookie.
Many major sites use AdSense. It took me a minute to find AdSense on newyorktimes.com, reuters.com, bloomberg.com, and cnn.com, and then I stopped looking because my suspicions were already confirmed. Even apart from AdSense, DoubleClick ads are all over the web. Unless you disable JavaScript, which makes surfing inconvenient on many sites and impossible on some, you are getting thoroughly tracked.
This tracking is a major move on Google’s part. The referral from the phone-home to doubleclick.net contains the complete URL of the page you are viewing. It happens in the same instant that your browser offers up the unique ID from your cookie. Google can add a time stamp and your IP address — and knowing Google, they will.”
KDE (and FOSS in general) has not been very critical in the past and Google services are generally well integrated. Kickoff searches Google by default with no choices, Konqueror 4.4 will use the Google auto-completion added by a Google fan, other services like yahoo and bling/msn are not in the default webshortcuts list, GSoC is supposed to be an internship for Google only – not thought about that Google tries to influence and profit from FOSS in an anti-privacy, meaning part of freedom, meaning target of FOSS way.
Massive Mozilla sponsoring to be the default and deeply integrated search technology for Firefox + the project of Chrome are serious evidence of Google’s push to move apps from the desktop inside the browser, somewhere they can track the information. In fact I bet Google is not interested in high quality apps for the FOSS desktop, but only in a good browser for thin client FOSS desktops. Otherwise they could at least spend millions to freedesktop.org as well (like they do to be default search in Firefox).
So maybe even if you don’t like that (hello Google search/GMail users!) and don’t want to confront with Google being a really serious problem, a problem much harder to fix once you have a Google web-service monopoly (Google search, GMail, youtube, …) than a Microsoft OS monopoly, you should think about how much information and what kind of meta-information you have already entered in Google webforms/searching sites using DoubleClick/AdSense. You cannot easily/cheaply build a competitive freedom-oriented web-search and other web 2.0 platforms the way you can cooperatively write FOSS software to free from Microsoft. You need multi-billions to build large hardware clusters to compete with Google. P2P might be suited to build similar services, but it has major performance/design drawbacks to a cluster and the only really poor project about P2P-websearch I could find was Yacy, which is by no means competitive.
You can do nothing about it? FOSS can at least try to offer as much services as possible offline and try to keep Google out, while integrating only the necessary information exchange securely and directly (P2P social networking would be nice, e.g.). And by the way you live in a democratic system most likely, aren’t you?
Cheers,
whilo
Ohhhh like yahoo, live.com, and bing won’t do that.
Google built it’s “monopoly” by being the best in the world.
GMail monopoly? you have gotta be kiddin’ me, what about the Yahoo monopoly?
That was enough sarcasm for today, tell me then is Yahoo or Microsoft any different? Are they better somehow?
So what if Google has monopoly on web services? I don’t see any open source web services, not that I’d care, google offers more freedom than any other giant company, and you criticise it, if you don’t want to, then don’t use GMAil’s web interface, you can use it with KMail, and it works like a charm.
Hello, I’m the author of konqueror searchbar improvement for KDE 4.4, and I want to clarify few things:
1. It is not tied to google, but currently the only implementation is Google as a proof of concept. Initially I wanted to write one for Yahoo immediately, but then I discovered that there is something called OpenSearch, meaning that any search engine can be easily added to your browser, together with their other features like search suggestion. So I decided to do a little research on that topic and I’ll make Konqueror also supports OpenSearch, meaning that you can easily add your own search engine and if the engine supports search suggestion, you will also get it out of the box. So OpenSearch is the real future feature for Konqueror 4.4
2. If you don’t want your search data to be sent across the internet, you can always disable this feature forever.
How about editing /etc/hosts, and setting adsense.com and doubleclick.net as 127.0.0.1 ? Shouldn’t that put a stop to it?
I’ve setup Firefox to clear cookies & everything else on exit (plus Adblock+), and aliases for Konqueror which I run frequently:
alias clearcache=’/usr/bin/kio_http_cache_cleaner –clear-all’
alias clearcookies=’cat /dev/null > $HOME/.kde/share/apps/kcookiejar/cookies’
@AIM:
Actually they are different from Google. Yahoo and MS anonymize user data much earlier than Google does.
@Whilo:
I totally agree with you. IT “nerds” these days are totally Google’s bitches. FOSS projects like KDE should default to either a proxy service like Scroogle or google.auth-o-mat.com for searches or default to a search engine with better privacy.
@AIM You don’t get the point. Yahoo and Microsoft are not supposed to be “good” and are not integrated in the FOSS desktop and I have not seen a FOSS person actually proposing to use their services. Google has successfully claimed to be a nerd-friendly company, although it is multi-billion dollar industry dealing with your personal information.
Google uses a different strategy than MS or Yahoo. They are almost not selling products, they are only selling users information and services around it. You can claim they only do that for advertisement and keep their rules, but they have a monopoly on search already and they have very well done and dominant services in many other areas.
I don’t claim Google services are technically bad, they aren’t. I claim that Google actually is against the work spend for FOSS to free computer usage from monopolies and to keep your information private and controlled by your self.
Since Google is not selling code but services generally it also profits very well from FOSS, because it can take code, open standards and support from the community, without being forced to open their services and make them transparent. You can call that cheap labour.
@fyanardi
Your actions are absolutely o.k. for me and I think this can be a great feature. What I miss is the awareness of Google being a problem to FOSS goals. It’s the same with Kickoff’s Google integration. It is not bad to have Google’s service available, I would not block them, but what I’d certainly try to do is to raise the awareness of Google’s strategy and think about FOSS decentralized alternatives. I find it interesting that Google gets integrated by default, but other implementations rarely happen. Given the fact that FOSS desktops are already in the millions out there, GSoC might be a really well method of influencing FOSS people’s opinion cheaply (only a few thousand bugs for a DE like KDE for a year).
@Roland
This does not allow you to avoid Google services, only AdSense/DoubleClick. And it gives you a false security, since they might always add new hostnames you don’t know yet. To avoid Google services one would generally have to stop using their services, which is hard if they control huge parts of the advertisement on the web and many key technologies (search,gmail,youtube,orkut,blogspot,…)
p.s. have you disabled flash cookies?
@Markus it is a real pity that people don’t try to integrate the FOSS desktop better to generate P2P services for websearch or social networking by default. The proxy is only a last defense.
Cheers,
whilo
Alternative opensource to google:
Openripple: http://openripple.sphoera.com/
@Francisco
thx for the link, but the site seems to be down at the moment. I could find other sources about it though. Looks like it is like Yacy (http://yacy.net), which works already, but is still far away from being stable and fast. My node simply stopped working after some weeks, since it somewhere stops when loading the index database. To be successful I think it should be part of the DE itself.
Rather than integrating all services into central servers on the web one should try to create services for desktop which interfere with the web. Plasmoids are already good interface design for that.
I agree and I’ll go further.
Why most FOSS software projects don’t aligned themselves more explicitly with other projects with the same principles of FOSS. Like free culture, freedom of expression, privacy, security, etc…
Why is it that support is added very quickly to proprietary web services like Last.fm but not to Libre.fm.
More examples: OpenSourceManuals, OpenStreetMap, Magnatune, etc.
Very valid points!
Are there any P2P social networks? I am refusing to sign up to Facebook as long as the company’s primary method of making money is selling their users’ data. The only problem is that in some parts of social life you cannot even participate anymore if you are not on there (e.g. event invitation and reservation only possible through Facebook). This has got to change. There are massive opportunities for the FOSS community.
@Jerome
I think the problem is that in general developers are not aware of the current problems they are in in improving the “free” in FOSS. They still claim to fight Microsoft, which slowly gets less important.
@Sandro
Not that I know. Personally I think that web-pages suck compared to e.g. a plasma containment, since it can adjust itself much better (nearer) to the users data without having to do everything with the yet to evolve web tools on an “evil” server.
IM is already there and with jabber really well done, why not define several additional personal information meta data and assign external urls/services what not to it, so you can browse your buddys and show all the information from several different sources if you like (maybe even in a nice context based plasmoid view). You could even get the relevant information from other services (local and private ones) hidden from the IM service, but only mapped by the client to your addressbook.
Note: This would even work with Facebook/YourNextHypedNet/… since you can simply add their sites and services to urls in the IM profile/addressbook, if you have an account and want to use FaceBook. This would require parsing data from the web frontend to it though (bad idea generally).
I think this might be part of what telepathy and meta-contacts are about.
i am just starting out with Google Adsense. i am hoping that i would earn a good deal of money on this program.
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Good post,This was exactly what I needed to read today! I am sure this has relevance to many of us out there.
How about editing /etc/hosts, and setting adsense.com and doubleclick.net as 127.0.0.1 ? Shouldn’t that put a stop to it?
I’ve setup Firefox to clear cookies & everything else on exit /cookies’
Classic exposition, I have also mentioned it in my blog article. But it is a pity that almost no friend
discussed it with me. I am very happy to see your article.
Hello, I’m the author of konqueror searchbar improvement for KDE 4.4, and I want to clarify few things:
Adsense is the best paying make money online program on the internet. I just wish that i could increase my website traffic to high levels so that i could earn more money on Adsense.