| 1 |
On Thursday 26 Jan 2012 11:33:14 Neil Bothwick wrote: |
| 2 |
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:07:51 +0000, Mick wrote: |
| 3 |
> > BTW, it seems to me that if you access youtube and at the same time |
| 4 |
> > search Google without being logged in to any of their portals, they |
| 5 |
> > will not be tracking your email for user profiling purposes. They may |
| 6 |
> > be logging IP addresses but it could be different users on the same IP |
| 7 |
> > address, so advertising results would not be relevant. |
| 8 |
> |
| 9 |
> They can track a lot more than IP addresses, your browser can provide a |
| 10 |
> lot of information, not just user-agent but installed fonts, plugin |
| 11 |
> information and much more. There is enough to do a damn good job of |
| 12 |
> identifying you even when your IP address changes. It is certainly simple |
| 13 |
> to see if you are one user or two. |
| 14 |
|
| 15 |
Not necessarily without making some broad assumptions. For example two |
| 16 |
different users could be using the same machine and OS and browser; or same |
| 17 |
user could be using same machine, but different browser; or different users |
| 18 |
using different machines with same OS & browser, etc. |
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
So extrapolating the user profile from browser headers is unreliable. Of |
| 21 |
course Google may only be interested in getting right most of the time in |
| 22 |
which case they may use such info - although I have not found any references |
| 23 |
that they actually do. |
| 24 |
-- |
| 25 |
Regards, |
| 26 |
Mick |
Archives