Here’s a good example of why the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry?” argument against privacy invasion is useless and misguided. Just because you aren’t doing anything illegal, does that mean you want your family to be able to see what you’ve been searching for without you realising? Of course not — privacy is important, regardless of what you’re doing! As is computer security, which is maybe more closely related to this issue.
So what’s got me going on about this? Today I signed into my Google Personalised Homepage to see what search terms were in my Search History after a friend brought it to my attention.
I have looked at my search history before and it freaked me out a bit to see all the stuff I’d searched for, but today when I went to look, I noticed some searches in there that I definitely hadn’t done. They were…my MOTHER’s searches! Obviously what’s happened is that I have signed in to one of Google’s services on my Mum’s computer and now her searches are being recorded as mine.
How easy would it be to get on your friend’s (or enemy’s!) computer and sign in to the Google personalised homepage as some Google account you have created for the purpose, and then let it track everything that person searches for until the end of time (or until they realise or delete their cookies or get another browser…), you sure could get some useful and/or embarrassing information I bet.
I’d like to do a SecurityFocus kind of investigation into this, I think there could be some privacy issues here — I wonder if there’s a way to send people a link to sign them into a Google account you desire.