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.
Excellent initiative actually, and wondering why they didn't do it before. A great way to collect more accurate information about user behaviour. I'll stay safe and more anonymous to google and stick to OpenDNS instead...
&
Quote:
Originally Posted by sheff
Google is the internet. This is a cool way for google to be adware as hell with people voluntarily giving it the information it wants, and then it makes money off of that. Pure genius.
Wow! I was having major issues with Safari for the last few months and I didn't know what caused this to suddenly happen.
I'd get a lot of beachballs, often my browser would freeze up and several times a week, Safari would just plain crash.
I recently installed a 25Mbps connection to deal with speed issues but that didn't fix it... so I attributed the problems to the latest revision of Safari..
... well, I just changed my DNS settings to Google and BAM! Every website I've thrown at Safari loads in an instant!
It was my damn ISP's DNS routing system that was breaking Safari!! Some URLs would take a noticeable pause to resolve. Now, I type in a URL, hit enter and it instantly loads the page. I can also type a URL without the .com and it'll figure it out whereas before, I would get my ISP's page full of ads and unhelpful URL suggestions.
I currently using a MacBook running 10.5.8 and an Airport Extreme-N. I cant seem to figure out how to set up my system to use the Google DNS servers. I first tried add both IP addresses (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4) under DNS servers on my Airport Extreme. I went to the test site Google recommends (http://18.62.1.6) and the page didnt load. I next tried adding the DNS servers on my Mac following Google's setup instructions (http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html) but still no luck - the test page still wouldn't load. What am I doing wrong?
I've used OpenDNS for some time so I restarted my computer and made some timing tests using WebSitePulse (http://www.websitepulse.com/corporate/alltools.php) to access several web sites I frequent hourly. Then switched to Google's DNS lookup, restarted and ran the same suite of tests.
Results, Google was faster in every case, sometimes significantly faster.
I'm sold...until millions of people switch over and things slow down again.
Thanks for this. I did a few ping tests to my local ISP's DNS servers. My ISP's were significantly better as far as latency, but I didn't know of a way to do any real world tests.
I got significantly faster results from Road Runner's DNS servers. I think I'll pass.
... I'll stay safe and more anonymous to google and stick to OpenDNS instead...
Quote:
Originally Posted by isaidso
Right there with ya.
These guys are starting to really scare me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rhowarth
Hmm, so you want Google to keep a record of every domain and IP address you've ever accessed, including mistyped domain names...?
Quote:
Originally Posted by macosxp
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.
Thank goodness people are starting to pay attention to this! Google is not an inherently evil company, but there's no way any company should be allowed to have so much cross-domain knowledge about so many people. They know more about you than the Feds, and probably more than many of your relatives. At some point at least some of their data WILL be hacked, there's no doubt about that at all. And just because they are "good guys" right now, it doesn't mean squat down the road when new management comes in and everything changes. Many of you are too young to have a long-term perspective on this, but trust me, companies always change personalities when management changes, and people move on or retire all the time. Remember, YOUR DATA LIVES ON IN PERPETUITY!
Those of you that are looking at this as a freebie and changing merely because of a few milliseconds better service should be thinking about the bigger picture. Now in severe cases like iPedro, maybe there's a point where you can't tolerate the alternative, but for most of us, this should NOT be something to jump into lightly. Consider other options, like OpenDNS, etc.
Thank goodness people are starting to pay attention to this! Google is not an inherently evil company, but there's no way any company should be allowed to have so much cross-domain knowledge about so many people. They know more about you than the Feds, and probably more than many of your relatives. At some point at least some of their data WILL be hacked, there's no doubt about that at all. And just because they are "good guys" right now, it doesn't mean squat down the road when new management comes in and everything changes. Many of you are too young to have a long-term perspective on this, but trust me, companies always change personalities when management changes, and people move on or retire all the time. Remember, YOUR DATA LIVES ON IN PERPETUITY!
Those of you that are looking at this as a freebie and changing merely because of a few milliseconds better service should be thinking about the bigger picture. Now in severe cases like iPedro, maybe there's a point where you can't tolerate the alternative, but for most of us, this should NOT be something to jump into lightly. Consider other options, like OpenDNS, etc.
As far as DNS goes, that's a bit much. They know that IP address X went to web site Y. With DHCP, and generic DLS and Cable Modem names, it's unlikely they would be able to uniquely identify you other than via a generic IP. Unless you ISP starts giving Google your name based on IP, the data is only useful for advertising and trending. Valuable to Google, but not really personally identifiable in any real way.
As far as DNS goes, that's a bit much. They know that IP address X went to web site Y. With DHCP, and generic DLS and Cable Modem names, it's unlikely they would be able to uniquely identify you other than via a generic IP. Unless you ISP starts giving Google your name based on IP, the data is only useful for advertising and trending. Valuable to Google, but not really personally identifiable in any real way.
I'm afraid you're not really thinking this through.
Unless you don't subscribe to anything online, don't use web email, don't use cookies, etc., your IP address is you. Use gmail at all?
And most ISPs, even with DHCP keep their subscribers on a consistent IP for some time before it changes. So while all the dotted lines may not be connected directly at any given point in time, all the pieces can be put together readily by anyone with enough data and the interest to do so. Remember the poor lady who, along with hundreds of thousands of others had their data spilled by AOL to "researchers"? They didn't think any of it was identifiable. How ignorant they were.
Currently, your ISP (or OpenDNS or whoever you use) has all your DNS requests already (they probably do nothing with them, it's not especially valuable until it's combined with other data). The difference here is now this data is in the hands of the biggest aggregator of personal data on the planet.
Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users.
We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.
In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.
(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.
Wondering why. Maybe automatic research on what folks are doing on the web?
If you read the article...
Quote:
Instead, the company is providing the service for free as a way to collect information about how users use the Internet on an anonymous and aggregated level.
Wow! I was having major issues with Safari for the last few months and I didn't know what caused this to suddenly happen.
I'd get a lot of beachballs, often my browser would freeze up and several times a week, Safari would just plain crash.
I recently installed a 25Mbps connection to deal with speed issues but that didn't fix it... so I attributed the problems to the latest revision of Safari..
... well, I just changed my DNS settings to Google and BAM! Every website I've thrown at Safari loads in an instant!
It was my damn ISP's DNS routing system that was breaking Safari!! Some URLs would take a noticeable pause to resolve. Now, I type in a URL, hit enter and it instantly loads the page. I can also type a URL without the .com and it'll figure it out whereas before, I would get my ISP's page full of ads and unhelpful URL suggestions.
Thank you Google!!
My words exactly...
THANK YOU GOOGLE! My Internet provider, RCN, sometime ago started "re-directing" my mistyped domain names to their stupid search engine system. As I looked for ways to make it stop, all other free alternatives redirected also, as a way to pay for the service.
Now Google gives you a DNS that promises (ironically give...n its what they do) no redirects to a search engine if you mistype something. More than anything, I want the opportunity to simply correct the URL... and not be forced to edit the ugly "redirect" URL they've replaced it with. Woo-hoo!
Moreover, recently... for no explicable reason, quickenonline started giving me a "certificate revoked" notice. I tried looking this up, and even though everything basically said "just enter an exception" the system refused to work right (Safari let me bypass the error, but the error persisted). Now that I've updated, I pop onto quickonline without any problems. I sware, these ISP jerkwads don't know how they're chasing customers off. If they simply allowed me to turn their "search" feature off, I wouldn't have to look elsewhere for domain name resolution.
My ISP's DNS server has been playing up lately. It does so every 6 months or so and they've never found a fix it in all the years I've been with them. Google to the rescue.
Yes, there are privacy concerns: your ISP knowing every site you visit is unavoidable, but this is a whole extra group. But on the other hand, nothing I do is particularly special so I don't really care if they do collect.
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.
THANK YOU GOOGLE! My Internet provider, RCN, sometime ago started "re-directing" my mistyped domain names to their stupid search engine system. As I looked for ways to make it stop, all other free alternatives redirected also, as a way to pay for the service.
Now Google gives you a DNS that promises (ironically give...n its what they do) no redirects to a search engine if you mistype something. More than anything, I want the opportunity to simply correct the URL... and not be forced to edit the ugly "redirect" URL they've replaced it with. Woo-hoo!
Moreover, recently... for no explicable reason, quickenonline started giving me a "certificate revoked" notice. I tried looking this up, and even though everything basically said "just enter an exception" the system refused to work right (Safari let me bypass the error, but the error persisted). Now that I've updated, I pop onto quickonline without any problems. I sware, these ISP jerkwads don't know how they're chasing customers off. If they simply allowed me to turn their "search" feature off, I wouldn't have to look elsewhere for domain name resolution.
~ CB
Just wanted to report that Google's DNS option works great for me here in Germany too. I'm currently with T-Online, and have also thought that the servers their were a big bottleneck. I also had tried OpenDNS in the past, without any noticeable difference.
GoogleDNS on the other hand has sped up my connection by more than a few seconds per page. I should mention that it is most noticeable because I can only get an "Ultra-Light DNS" connection here where I live: try 480kb(!)... so every second counts.
I'm going to try it out on my satellite ISP next, but alas, nothing will help that catastrophe of a service, with an inherent 1+/second ping latency. Only use it for updates and software downloads anyway, so.... no big deal.
Re: Security concerns - I have the choice of Google, or the (still roughly 30%) partially government owned Deutsche Telekom. The track record here actually points to Google being the safer bet, because they are constantly under scrutiny here. However DT has over the the last year or so been involved in quite a few scandals here re: data-loss, data-sharing, and other assorted security problems.
BTW: what really is sooo bad about targeted ads anyway? If ads are necessary to be able to view what the web and assorted future internet services have to offer... I'll take targeted over mass-consumtion ads any day. Just my 2 cents.
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.
They don't need to break break their DNS privacy terms and log the IP address of the computer making the request, but they could still correlate things in lots of interesting ways. You probably have a bunch of sites you go to regularly (Appleinsider, mac.com, your kids' school web sites, your employer's email server, your local pizza shop, that porn site in South America, ...) and they would know it's all the same person.
Comments
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.
Excellent initiative actually, and wondering why they didn't do it before. A great way to collect more accurate information about user behaviour. I'll stay safe and more anonymous to google and stick to OpenDNS instead...
&
Google is the internet. This is a cool way for google to be adware as hell with people voluntarily giving it the information it wants, and then it makes money off of that. Pure genius.
+1 for both.
I'd get a lot of beachballs, often my browser would freeze up and several times a week, Safari would just plain crash.
I recently installed a 25Mbps connection to deal with speed issues but that didn't fix it... so I attributed the problems to the latest revision of Safari..
... well, I just changed my DNS settings to Google and BAM! Every website I've thrown at Safari loads in an instant!
It was my damn ISP's DNS routing system that was breaking Safari!! Some URLs would take a noticeable pause to resolve. Now, I type in a URL, hit enter and it instantly loads the page. I can also type a URL without the .com and it'll figure it out whereas before, I would get my ISP's page full of ads and unhelpful URL suggestions.
Thank you Google!!
I've used OpenDNS for some time so I restarted my computer and made some timing tests using WebSitePulse (http://www.websitepulse.com/corporate/alltools.php) to access several web sites I frequent hourly. Then switched to Google's DNS lookup, restarted and ran the same suite of tests.
Results, Google was faster in every case, sometimes significantly faster.
I'm sold...until millions of people switch over and things slow down again.
Thanks for this. I did a few ping tests to my local ISP's DNS servers. My ISP's were significantly better as far as latency, but I didn't know of a way to do any real world tests.
I got significantly faster results from Road Runner's DNS servers. I think I'll pass.
... I'll stay safe and more anonymous to google and stick to OpenDNS instead...
Right there with ya.
These guys are starting to really scare me.
Hmm, so you want Google to keep a record of every domain and IP address you've ever accessed, including mistyped domain names...?
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.
Thank goodness people are starting to pay attention to this! Google is not an inherently evil company, but there's no way any company should be allowed to have so much cross-domain knowledge about so many people. They know more about you than the Feds, and probably more than many of your relatives. At some point at least some of their data WILL be hacked, there's no doubt about that at all. And just because they are "good guys" right now, it doesn't mean squat down the road when new management comes in and everything changes. Many of you are too young to have a long-term perspective on this, but trust me, companies always change personalities when management changes, and people move on or retire all the time. Remember, YOUR DATA LIVES ON IN PERPETUITY!
Those of you that are looking at this as a freebie and changing merely because of a few milliseconds better service should be thinking about the bigger picture. Now in severe cases like iPedro, maybe there's a point where you can't tolerate the alternative, but for most of us, this should NOT be something to jump into lightly. Consider other options, like OpenDNS, etc.
Thank goodness people are starting to pay attention to this! Google is not an inherently evil company, but there's no way any company should be allowed to have so much cross-domain knowledge about so many people. They know more about you than the Feds, and probably more than many of your relatives. At some point at least some of their data WILL be hacked, there's no doubt about that at all. And just because they are "good guys" right now, it doesn't mean squat down the road when new management comes in and everything changes. Many of you are too young to have a long-term perspective on this, but trust me, companies always change personalities when management changes, and people move on or retire all the time. Remember, YOUR DATA LIVES ON IN PERPETUITY!
Those of you that are looking at this as a freebie and changing merely because of a few milliseconds better service should be thinking about the bigger picture. Now in severe cases like iPedro, maybe there's a point where you can't tolerate the alternative, but for most of us, this should NOT be something to jump into lightly. Consider other options, like OpenDNS, etc.
As far as DNS goes, that's a bit much. They know that IP address X went to web site Y. With DHCP, and generic DLS and Cable Modem names, it's unlikely they would be able to uniquely identify you other than via a generic IP. Unless you ISP starts giving Google your name based on IP, the data is only useful for advertising and trending. Valuable to Google, but not really personally identifiable in any real way.
As far as DNS goes, that's a bit much. They know that IP address X went to web site Y. With DHCP, and generic DLS and Cable Modem names, it's unlikely they would be able to uniquely identify you other than via a generic IP. Unless you ISP starts giving Google your name based on IP, the data is only useful for advertising and trending. Valuable to Google, but not really personally identifiable in any real way.
I'm afraid you're not really thinking this through.
Unless you don't subscribe to anything online, don't use web email, don't use cookies, etc., your IP address is you. Use gmail at all?
And most ISPs, even with DHCP keep their subscribers on a consistent IP for some time before it changes. So while all the dotted lines may not be connected directly at any given point in time, all the pieces can be put together readily by anyone with enough data and the interest to do so. Remember the poor lady who, along with hundreds of thousands of others had their data spilled by AOL to "researchers"? They didn't think any of it was identifiable. How ignorant they were.
Currently, your ISP (or OpenDNS or whoever you use) has all your DNS requests already (they probably do nothing with them, it's not especially valuable until it's combined with other data). The difference here is now this data is in the hands of the biggest aggregator of personal data on the planet.
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users.
We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.
In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.
(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.
Wondering why. Maybe automatic research on what folks are doing on the web?
If you read the article...
Instead, the company is providing the service for free as a way to collect information about how users use the Internet on an anonymous and aggregated level.
Wow! I was having major issues with Safari for the last few months and I didn't know what caused this to suddenly happen.
I'd get a lot of beachballs, often my browser would freeze up and several times a week, Safari would just plain crash.
I recently installed a 25Mbps connection to deal with speed issues but that didn't fix it... so I attributed the problems to the latest revision of Safari..
... well, I just changed my DNS settings to Google and BAM! Every website I've thrown at Safari loads in an instant!
It was my damn ISP's DNS routing system that was breaking Safari!! Some URLs would take a noticeable pause to resolve. Now, I type in a URL, hit enter and it instantly loads the page. I can also type a URL without the .com and it'll figure it out whereas before, I would get my ISP's page full of ads and unhelpful URL suggestions.
Thank you Google!!
My words exactly...
THANK YOU GOOGLE! My Internet provider, RCN, sometime ago started "re-directing" my mistyped domain names to their stupid search engine system. As I looked for ways to make it stop, all other free alternatives redirected also, as a way to pay for the service.
Now Google gives you a DNS that promises (ironically give...n its what they do) no redirects to a search engine if you mistype something. More than anything, I want the opportunity to simply correct the URL... and not be forced to edit the ugly "redirect" URL they've replaced it with. Woo-hoo!
Moreover, recently... for no explicable reason, quickenonline started giving me a "certificate revoked" notice. I tried looking this up, and even though everything basically said "just enter an exception" the system refused to work right (Safari let me bypass the error, but the error persisted). Now that I've updated, I pop onto quickonline without any problems. I sware, these ISP jerkwads don't know how they're chasing customers off. If they simply allowed me to turn their "search" feature off, I wouldn't have to look elsewhere for domain name resolution.
~ CB
Yes, there are privacy concerns: your ISP knowing every site you visit is unavoidable, but this is a whole extra group. But on the other hand, nothing I do is particularly special so I don't really care if they do collect.
OK the Google Andriod stuff I can understand, but THIS is not related to Apple in any way!
Oh, yeah, it's not like Apple users use the internet, or anything...
My words exactly...
THANK YOU GOOGLE! My Internet provider, RCN, sometime ago started "re-directing" my mistyped domain names to their stupid search engine system. As I looked for ways to make it stop, all other free alternatives redirected also, as a way to pay for the service.
Now Google gives you a DNS that promises (ironically give...n its what they do) no redirects to a search engine if you mistype something. More than anything, I want the opportunity to simply correct the URL... and not be forced to edit the ugly "redirect" URL they've replaced it with. Woo-hoo!
Moreover, recently... for no explicable reason, quickenonline started giving me a "certificate revoked" notice. I tried looking this up, and even though everything basically said "just enter an exception" the system refused to work right (Safari let me bypass the error, but the error persisted). Now that I've updated, I pop onto quickonline without any problems. I sware, these ISP jerkwads don't know how they're chasing customers off. If they simply allowed me to turn their "search" feature off, I wouldn't have to look elsewhere for domain name resolution.
~ CB
Just wanted to report that Google's DNS option works great for me here in Germany too. I'm currently with T-Online, and have also thought that the servers their were a big bottleneck. I also had tried OpenDNS in the past, without any noticeable difference.
GoogleDNS on the other hand has sped up my connection by more than a few seconds per page. I should mention that it is most noticeable because I can only get an "Ultra-Light DNS" connection here where I live: try 480kb(!)... so every second counts.
I'm going to try it out on my satellite ISP next, but alas, nothing will help that catastrophe of a service, with an inherent 1+/second ping latency. Only use it for updates and software downloads anyway, so.... no big deal.
Re: Security concerns - I have the choice of Google, or the (still roughly 30%) partially government owned Deutsche Telekom. The track record here actually points to Google being the safer bet, because they are constantly under scrutiny here. However DT has over the the last year or so been involved in quite a few scandals here re: data-loss, data-sharing, and other assorted security problems.
BTW: what really is sooo bad about targeted ads anyway? If ads are necessary to be able to view what the web and assorted future internet services have to offer... I'll take targeted over mass-consumtion ads any day. Just my 2 cents.
Good luck with this.
Did anyone actually read Google's Public DNS privacy statement?
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
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.
They don't need to break break their DNS privacy terms and log the IP address of the computer making the request, but they could still correlate things in lots of interesting ways. You probably have a bunch of sites you go to regularly (Appleinsider, mac.com, your kids' school web sites, your employer's email server, your local pizza shop, that porn site in South America, ...) and they would know it's all the same person.