Google introduced their new "History" feature yesterday, that lets you see all the information they know about you. Hey nice, right? You can even go in and delete anything embarassing you dont want there. Or can you?
http://www.google.com/history/whprivacyfaq.html
"What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the Web History service?
You can choose to stop storing your web activity in Web History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in Web History Help. If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your search experience. As is common practice in the industry, Google also maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks. "
Yeah. So they only remove it from the list YOU can see. They dont really remove it. They have it forever and so do the people that use their advertising system, ie their partners.
Nice try. A "Feel good" feature that does nothing. Still, at least you can see what the gatekeepers can see, if this REALLY is all they have. Of course, the real data IMO is underneath the surface and is the culmination of what they DO with that data, comparing you to your neighbors and other net users.
