Tracking Google Tracking You

Google has a nifty feature called Web History that keeps track of not only your Google searches but also some of the pages you visit, presumably those containing AdSense, Google Analytics, or other Google scripts.

This can be useful for finding pages you've visited before and can also provide a fascinating perspective on what you've been doing. For instance, looking over my history I see that in the past few days I've searched for, among literally hundreds of other things:

• best mac cad software for architects (hoping to free my wife from AutoCAD)
• php importStylesheet segfault (PHP 5.2.5 has an XSLT crashing bug)
• "charlie wood" site:zdnet.com (looking for a specific article I was quoted in)
• average marathon footfalls (just curious)

But I must admit, all this creeps me out a little bit. Google remembers every search I've made since June 2005—all 15,662 of them—not to mention thousands of web pages I've visited. I'm sure this makes the quality of my search results somewhat better, but to me that's just too much information.

If you're interested in tracking exactly what Google is tracking about you in Web History, you can subscribe to a feed: https://www.google.com/history/?output=rss. Just enter your Google account name and password when prompted by your feed reader. (If you use Google Reader, which doesn't support secure feeds, you're out of luck. Try NetNewsWire.)

If on the other hand you simply want to opt out, Google lets you do that too. Just go to Google Web History, follow the "Remove items" link, and choose "Clear entire web history". This will delete your history and pause collection of any new data until you tell it to resume.

Comments

[Phil]

According to Google's terms of service, deleting your info simply means that you can't see it anymore... but they can still maintain it in their logs.

Personally, I use the "Customize Google" Firefox extension which scrambles Google's cookies, and never stay logged into Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.

This is the only solution I've found to keep Google's prying eyes off of me.