On Google, a political mystery that's all numbers
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Nov 2012 12:28 UTC
Google "Google's quest to guess what we want before we want it has produced an unusual side effect: a disparity in the results the company presents about the presidential candidates. A Wall Street Journal examination found that the search engine often customizes the results of people who have recently searched for 'Obama' - but not those who have recently searched for 'Romney'." A confirmation bias' wet dream, this. The confirmation bias is already one of the root psychological causes of much of the problems in the world as it is - we really shouldn't have technology companies make it worse. Technology - and more specifically, the internet - should fight this bias, not affirm it.
E-mail Print r 1   32 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/kgq
Thread beginning with comment 541030
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Bill Shooter of Bul
Member since:
2006-07-14

But, in most cases you don't have a unique ip address assigned to your computer. In my house, company, cafe, we NAT.

Reply Parent Score: 1

Morgan Member since:
2005-06-29

Huh? Websites never see your internal NATed address anyway, so what does it matter? Whether you're searching from your laptop, your spouse's tablet, your cellphone via your WiFi, or any other device on your router, Google will see your single ISP-assigned IP address for all of those devices.

Also, if you stay signed into Google at home (across your devices) and at work, even though the IPs are different Google will tie them together internally and continue to analyze and link your traffic between the various locations. I've seen evidence of that first hand.

Reply Parent Score: 5

StephenBeDoper Member since:
2005-07-06

Also, if you stay signed into Google at home (across your devices) and at work, even though the IPs are different Google will tie them together internally and continue to analyze and link your traffic between the various locations. I've seen evidence of that first hand.


That's one of things that has started to sour me on Google. I'm not a privacy paranoid, but attempts to lead me by the nose do still bother me on principle. Things like trying to get me to use something that I would normally avoid (a Google search account) by tying it to something I do use (a youtube account), and making it impossible to login to one without logging into the other.

The result is that I've ditched google search in favour of scroogle. I still trust them farther than Facebook, though - thanks to everyone's willingness to stick "like" widgets on their websites, I'd bet good money that Facebook has more personally-identifiable information about people's browsing history than Google does.

Reply Parent Score: 3

Bill Shooter of Bul Member since:
2006-07-14

I think you're confused. The original poster was essentially saying that going into private browsing wouldn't help because your ip address doesn't change, therefore google can still identify you. My point is that when you are NATed, without any additional information, the ip address can't uniquely identify a user. So if you have 5000 users all using the same external ip address, I think you're safe from ip based tracking ( obviously being signed on to google services is another thing entirely).

Reply Parent Score: 2

Read more of this thread... >
zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Also, if you stay signed into Google at home (across your devices) and at work, even though the IPs are different Google will tie them together internally and continue to analyze and link your traffic between the various locations. I've seen evidence of that first hand.

Wait, as in - even when you sign out at the second location, the traffic from that IP still influencing searches?

Reply Parent Score: 2