Comments on: Google Analytics — the deep web

By: adsense tools

adsense tools — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 03:44:25 +0000

your blog about google is interesting

By: Boris Gruschko

Boris Gruschko — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:08:38 +0000

@Diwaker: it’s not like this is a big concern for me either. Google has all my personal mail written in the last two years. This should be sufficient, to know pretty much everything about me :)

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:16:50 +0000

*@boris*: perhaps I’m missing how cookies work, but I don’t see why a cookie set by Analytics should store any information about what other websites I visit. My understanding is that cookies are website specific. So if I visit a web page that has the Analytics JS snippet, it may set a cookie on my browser. But why would that cookie be updated if I visit some other web page?

Actually scratch all the above. I just read your example, and I think you’re basically saying the same thing in a different way :-) I would be really interested in finding out if Google is doing this kind of reverse lookup — figure out the browsing profiles of individuals.

As for Google being able to figure out my identity — I don’t think thats a big concern at this point. Google already knows more about me than even I probably do.

*@gregor*: Thanks for that pointer, I didn’t know the PDF was online already. I was just searching for the big table paper a couple of days back :)

By: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Gregor J. Rothfuss — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:52:26 +0000

http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf#page=10

200TB, growing quickly.

By: Boris Gruschko

Boris Gruschko — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:27:39 +0000

Actually I think, It’s not about your site at all. The thing is, that analytics sets a cookie on every user’s browser. Much more powerfull source of information is, that now google gets to know, which pages an individual visits, regardless of his referal source.

Consider the following scenario: User U visits sites A, B and C. A and C use google analytics. Now google has got to know, that U visited A and C. Without A and C being actually affiliated with google. Now, this certainly can be used, to optimise adds for the user U. His identity can be easily determined, by for example correlating analytics data with U’s gmail account.

The power of this, is that probably a good portion of websites will be using google analytics, due to it’s origins (everyone loves google products). The benefits google gets from all this information is certainly exponential to the number of sites using analytics.