Gmail & Google Privacy Issue
I have been hearing stuff about Google’s Gmail (aka Google Mail in UK), that each and everyone of your emails are being indexed. And could end up in Google’s search results. Well that is a BIG PRIVACY ISSUE!
It is true that Google doesn’t really care about our privacy, because the googlebots (the robots aka spiders that crawl sites and index it for google search results) index everything and sometimes it contains confidential/personal stuff. And most of all it doesn’t follow what is written in a site’s robots.txt. And it is really really difficult (sometimes impossible) to get a search result off Google.
My email address appears on a Google….And spammers could just add it to their list and spam me. Well I like how Microsoft respects your privacy..
I’ll post more about the Gmail issue later, after I learn more. It could be true!
31 August 2007 at 12:31 pm
Google search is great, but beware of other services. I refer to Google as Big Brother (like the book 1984), because it is everywhere and knows what you do online. I haven’t used Gmail, because it is probably about as (un)safe as Yahoo, Hotmail or any other free email. If you value your privacy, you wouldn’t use a free email service to send or receive private emails.
Google search knows what you search and you may find spam related to your search in your mail. I searched a subject and didn’t really click the links. By the next day, I received spam about that subject. This has happened before and I don’t use the Google Toolbar.
Google really does index most files inside your root directory of your web host. You could protect files with a login using php or .htaccess files. Even if the robots.txt files are noticed, they are ignored if a link goes to a file. Search engines follow IMG and A HREF tags. The no index, no follow could appear next to the tag and probably choke the w3c validator.
Removing files from Google listings by request takes time, but it is possible. It is easier to remove the file or rename it to break the link to that file. If you make duplicate pages, both will be removed, because that is considered spamming.
Google doesn’t want to be spammed, but they don’t mid spamming you!