Everything Google does is great and all, but it makes me nervous when that one company can have access to so much information:
People's documents, people's web browser, people's OS, people's email, people's IM, people's telephone calls, people's medical records, people's search terms, people's checkout accounts, people's bookshelves, people's news feeds, people's blogs, people's driving directions, people's photos, people's geolocation, people's video, people's finances, people's calendars, people's websites, whatever I forgot to mention, and now what people type into their address bar.
Has there ever been one company that is so ubiquitous like this? I use their services because they're great, and I seriously doubt Google would want to risk its billions by breaching privacy regulations, but I think Google has more information than any intelligence agency, and there's building potential for exploitation.
Don't worry, Google isn't evil. And they're not located in a jurisdiction that coerces unconstitutional collection of private data by the federal government, bypassing set regulatory procedures.
in a quick test on one machine - it subjectively seemed faster - but prevented my local screen sharing from working - perhaps setup on my router it would not interfere with local traffic - though I would have to test it against my VPN for work before i could use it full time.
If there is any sort of tracking info that Google could capture - so too can anyone else providing DNS services - so it is not a matter of what might Google do with the data - but what might any provider do with it if they wanted to. On the other hand if lots and lots of people all use the same DNS provider then there may be somethings related to the scale that a lot of smaller providers would not see.
I'll grant you that they could be nefarious if they wanted to, but they explicitly state they're not doing what some of you think they're doing.
Good catch, and no, I responded before reading that. It does look like a pretty good policy, as far as it goes.
Just to play devil's advocate a bit though, what happens over the long run when Google gains a large enough foothold in this arena. As individual ISPs have less need to manage robust DNS services, they will likely put even less resources into it than they are, which is already pretty bad in some cases. At that point there will be no separate infrastructure strong enough for users to fall back on if (no, when) Google decides they don't have to play this nicely. Yes, this is a little conspiracy-theorist in nature, but trying to keep people thinking.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cnocbui
I already block all calls to google-analytics from web pages and use ask.com in the first instance when searching, so I'm hardly going to go and use this latest offering.
Smart man. Can't imagine why anyone would allow themselves to be tracked like this. Takes 30 seconds to fix. Edit /etc/hosts and insert these two lines:
are there any other hosts related to 'ga' that I've missed?
Also, ask.com is ok, but if you want your first instance to be as private and separate as possible from data mining, take a look at Cuil's privacy policy. Nothing's perfect, but that's quite good. If the quality of their search engine was only 1/2 as good as Google, I'd use it 99% of the time.
I've done some simple testing from a performance perspective, and there aren't any real surprises with Google. They're in the same ballpark as the other remote bind servers like DynDNS and OpenDNS, which is a bit slower than my ISP, but nowhere near as fast as my own local caching server.
I tried OpenDNS for a while, but because of their desire to cram search results in place of a proper NXDOMAIN error, I gave up on them when it cost me a couple hours of troubleshooting to find a fat-fingered SMTP host name error.
However, since Google's privacy policy is better than Comcast's, and I feel better about Google's ability to properly deal with security issues, I've changed the way my local caching server searches, to prioritize Google's bind servers over Comcast's.
If people want to do something similar with their local firewall/routers, most will allow for at least two DNS server entries -- I'd recommend pointing the first at Google's, and then make the second their local ISP. That way, if a query to Google fails because their servers are for some reason inaccessible, their queries will fall back to their contracted provider.
It has made a huge difference for me to some web sites, ironically Appleinsider being one of the ones with the biggest speed up. I have 20 mb/s d/l on FiOs and this web site is terribly slow to load - or was. Now it loads and changes pages almost instantly ... no more beach ball in Safari.
Amazon has a service called Amazon Remembers - where they keep track of what you bought, what you searched for, what others who bought/searched for the same things also bought, etc.
They collect this information, use it to display other products that you might be interested in, have all your personal information - including your address, all the people you buy gifts for, what products/brands you are interested in, etc. They even have very good idea of your income level from the type of products you shop for.
The quality of information Amazon has, is definitely better than the info Google has about you - because it is backed by actual dollars of purchases, not random searches, etc. It is backed by complete knowledge of who you are, where you live, who your friends are, what your tastes are etc. And in no sense of the word can it be considered Anonymous to begin with, nor does it become Anonymous after any period of time.
No one seems to be having much of a problem with the information in Amazon's hands - whereas, Google seems to raise eyebrows for a lot of people.
Maybe one reason is that Google is so ubiquitous - and has info about so many aspects of your life. But I am sure there are a lot of people who depend on Amazon for everything from groceries, clothes, shoes, music, books, electronics, health related stuff, etc. Amazon would know much more about these people, in a much more reliable way, than Google can ever hope for. When Amazon uses this knowledge to push other products you might be interested in, we never look at it as a violation of privacy. Why do we get so concerned when Google uses the same information to post Ads we might be interested in?
In my opinion, we are not far from the day where Google offers a service where they tell you - "people who browsed for the sites you were interested in, also browsed these other sites". And they can even make money, by charging money from the other sites for priority in listing this info (very similar to how they make money selling words in the English language). How much money would LG be willing to pay, to target a lot of advertising at someone who recently visited the Sony or Samsung website? Right now, Google can target ads at anyone who searches for "52-inch LCD TV" - going forward, they can also target ads at anyone visiting a related site, even if you found the site outside of Google Search.
Maybe someone going to Pizza Hut web-site, and also going to a site that shows local weather in their town, could be shown an Ad that offers a discount from the nearby Dominos Pizza outlet. This is targeted advertising at its very best - offering you an ad/promotion for a product exactly when you are looking for it. Some might be threatened by this, but some might find it immensely useful.
Similar possibilities exist with Search, and Google has exploited all these possibilities in Search - the thing is, DNS gives them more power and allows them to access cases where someone has searched once, and bookmarked a site - with DNS, Google can capture even bookmarked websites, and present Ads when they are most relevant to the user.
Of course, this information can be misused, but then this is the internet age - if Google doesn't do this, someone else will. Services like OpenDNS and DynDNS exploit our DNS queries in other ways, some of which are quite irritating - at least the ways Google might use this info would likely be more useful than irritating.
My home network of 1 OS X server, 3 Macs, 2 Windows was brought to its knees when I implemented Google's DNS.
Good luck with this.
Are you running a internal DNS server on the OS X Server machine? If so you need to change to forwarders IP address to googles rather than the individual machine
Comments
Everything Google does is great and all, but it makes me nervous when that one company can have access to so much information:
People's documents, people's web browser, people's OS, people's email, people's IM, people's telephone calls, people's medical records, people's search terms, people's checkout accounts, people's bookshelves, people's news feeds, people's blogs, people's driving directions, people's photos, people's geolocation, people's video, people's finances, people's calendars, people's websites, whatever I forgot to mention, and now what people type into their address bar.
Has there ever been one company that is so ubiquitous like this? I use their services because they're great, and I seriously doubt Google would want to risk its billions by breaching privacy regulations, but I think Google has more information than any intelligence agency, and there's building potential for exploitation.
Don't worry, Google isn't evil. And they're not located in a jurisdiction that coerces unconstitutional collection of private data by the federal government, bypassing set regulatory procedures.
If there is any sort of tracking info that Google could capture - so too can anyone else providing DNS services - so it is not a matter of what might Google do with the data - but what might any provider do with it if they wanted to. On the other hand if lots and lots of people all use the same DNS provider then there may be somethings related to the scale that a lot of smaller providers would not see.
Did anyone actually read Google's Public DNS privacy statement?
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
(Emphasis mine.)
I'll grant you that they could be nefarious if they wanted to, but they explicitly state they're not doing what some of you think they're doing.
Good catch, and no, I responded before reading that. It does look like a pretty good policy, as far as it goes.
Just to play devil's advocate a bit though, what happens over the long run when Google gains a large enough foothold in this arena. As individual ISPs have less need to manage robust DNS services, they will likely put even less resources into it than they are, which is already pretty bad in some cases. At that point there will be no separate infrastructure strong enough for users to fall back on if (no, when) Google decides they don't have to play this nicely. Yes, this is a little conspiracy-theorist in nature, but trying to keep people thinking.
I already block all calls to google-analytics from web pages and use ask.com in the first instance when searching, so I'm hardly going to go and use this latest offering.
Smart man. Can't imagine why anyone would allow themselves to be tracked like this. Takes 30 seconds to fix. Edit /etc/hosts and insert these two lines:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
are there any other hosts related to 'ga' that I've missed?
Also, ask.com is ok, but if you want your first instance to be as private and separate as possible from data mining, take a look at Cuil's privacy policy. Nothing's perfect, but that's quite good. If the quality of their search engine was only 1/2 as good as Google, I'd use it 99% of the time.
I tried OpenDNS for a while, but because of their desire to cram search results in place of a proper NXDOMAIN error, I gave up on them when it cost me a couple hours of troubleshooting to find a fat-fingered SMTP host name error.
However, since Google's privacy policy is better than Comcast's, and I feel better about Google's ability to properly deal with security issues, I've changed the way my local caching server searches, to prioritize Google's bind servers over Comcast's.
If people want to do something similar with their local firewall/routers, most will allow for at least two DNS server entries -- I'd recommend pointing the first at Google's, and then make the second their local ISP. That way, if a query to Google fails because their servers are for some reason inaccessible, their queries will fall back to their contracted provider.
YMMV, JMHO.
They collect this information, use it to display other products that you might be interested in, have all your personal information - including your address, all the people you buy gifts for, what products/brands you are interested in, etc. They even have very good idea of your income level from the type of products you shop for.
The quality of information Amazon has, is definitely better than the info Google has about you - because it is backed by actual dollars of purchases, not random searches, etc. It is backed by complete knowledge of who you are, where you live, who your friends are, what your tastes are etc. And in no sense of the word can it be considered Anonymous to begin with, nor does it become Anonymous after any period of time.
No one seems to be having much of a problem with the information in Amazon's hands - whereas, Google seems to raise eyebrows for a lot of people.
Maybe one reason is that Google is so ubiquitous - and has info about so many aspects of your life. But I am sure there are a lot of people who depend on Amazon for everything from groceries, clothes, shoes, music, books, electronics, health related stuff, etc. Amazon would know much more about these people, in a much more reliable way, than Google can ever hope for. When Amazon uses this knowledge to push other products you might be interested in, we never look at it as a violation of privacy. Why do we get so concerned when Google uses the same information to post Ads we might be interested in?
In my opinion, we are not far from the day where Google offers a service where they tell you - "people who browsed for the sites you were interested in, also browsed these other sites". And they can even make money, by charging money from the other sites for priority in listing this info (very similar to how they make money selling words in the English language). How much money would LG be willing to pay, to target a lot of advertising at someone who recently visited the Sony or Samsung website? Right now, Google can target ads at anyone who searches for "52-inch LCD TV" - going forward, they can also target ads at anyone visiting a related site, even if you found the site outside of Google Search.
Maybe someone going to Pizza Hut web-site, and also going to a site that shows local weather in their town, could be shown an Ad that offers a discount from the nearby Dominos Pizza outlet. This is targeted advertising at its very best - offering you an ad/promotion for a product exactly when you are looking for it. Some might be threatened by this, but some might find it immensely useful.
Similar possibilities exist with Search, and Google has exploited all these possibilities in Search - the thing is, DNS gives them more power and allows them to access cases where someone has searched once, and bookmarked a site - with DNS, Google can capture even bookmarked websites, and present Ads when they are most relevant to the user.
Of course, this information can be misused, but then this is the internet age - if Google doesn't do this, someone else will. Services like OpenDNS and DynDNS exploit our DNS queries in other ways, some of which are quite irritating - at least the ways Google might use this info would likely be more useful than irritating.
My home network of 1 OS X server, 3 Macs, 2 Windows was brought to its knees when I implemented Google's DNS.
Good luck with this.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't Google's DNS, but your "home network admin" is to blame. See? He's got two windows machines on that network!
OK the Google Andriod stuff I can understand, but THIS is not related to Apple in any way!
Sorry, but it's relevant to Apple in a few ways. Google competes with Apple in more and
more areas every month, it seems. They have their own browser now, their own phone
software, etc. They want to be seen as the great gurus who help the online world work
better for everyone. This move is good for Google (nearly free marketing info), and good
for users of the internet no matter what browser they use (better DNS look-ups) -- and it
translates into massive PR brownie points for all-things-Google.
Apple needs to keep an eye on this sort of thing, and so do Apple supporters, IMHO.
My home network of 1 OS X server, 3 Macs, 2 Windows was brought to its knees when I implemented Google's DNS.
Good luck with this.
Are you running a internal DNS server on the OS X Server machine? If so you need to change to forwarders IP address to googles rather than the individual machine