Reconstructing Users' Web Histories From Personalized Search Results 44
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review:
"Personalization is a key part of Internet search, providing more relevant results and gaining loyal customers in the process. But new research highlights the privacy risks that this kind of personalization can bring. A team of European researchers, working with a researcher from the University of California, Irvine, found that they were able to hijack Google's personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users' Web search histories (PDF). Google has plugged most of the holes identified in the research, but the researchers say that other personalized services are likely to have similar vulnerabilities."
Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
"Personalization is a key part of Internet search
No thank you. All I need is for my searches to be even more limited by what somebody else thinks.
Keep the spam to a minimum and leave this 'personalization' waste-of-time out of it.
Re:Reconstructing? (Score:1, Insightful)
Cookie white-listing seems saner and saner.
DO NOT WANT (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to come here to post DO NOT WANT! But you beat me to it. So instead, I will post a message saying that I was going to post a message saying DO NOT WANT! Done.
Personalized search is a terrible idea, and can only lead to bad results if it doesn't work, or insulation from variety of it does work. I can't believe anybody would want it.
I assume I am safe with cookies and/or javascript turned off. Without javascript, Google never knows what I clicked on.
Re:Trackmenot (Score:3, Insightful)
It still has the flaw that you have to trust them not to make it appear that you are doing things you would never want associated with you.
Of course, trust is largely a social problem, so it isn't surprising that throwing technology at it doesn't help much.
Re:Obvious EU centrism (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't tell if you are trolling or if you really did fail basic set theory.
I'm just trolling, it's just funny that the only research institution name in the topic is the University of California, when the only researcher form this university started this study in the INRIA ( where he worked before moving to Irvine ).
It's a minor case of US monopolization ;-)
Re:Nicely played (Score:2, Insightful)
I think its great when the people discovering the problem, and the people being alerted about the problem behave so well to each other. (They sent the paper to google a month before releasing the final thing.)
That only works for Google. You know damn well if they sent that data to Microsoft they would have denied it for several months only to fix it when an exploit was released in the wild.That's how the Redmond spin works