The browser does it, and did it long before Google existed.

That doesn't mean Google couldn't or shouldn't prevent the browser from doing it.

When this all started, no one envisioned ad networks and data companies aggregating all this personal information, or even that search terms would be a central part of the Internet.

So now that we know what is going on, why allow this personal information to leak? As far as I can tell, the only reason is so Webmasters can do better at Google SEO. And that reason can be wholly mitigated through the use of Google's Webmaster Tools.

"And that reason can be wholly mitigated through the use of Google's Webmaster Tools."

No, Google's webmaster tools only provide a sampling of the data. We used to provide info for only 100 queries. Now we provide it for more queries, but it's still a sample: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-data...

Please don't make the argument that the data in our webmaster console is equivalent to the data that websites can currently find in their server logs, because that's not the case.

Hi Matt. Is there any technical reason why that tool can't provide full information? Clearly Google isn't opposed to not sending referrer data, given the existence of https search, but doesn't DDG have a point about third parties having access to the referrer data? (Full disclosure: I wrote this article)

Maybe not "when it all started" but we envisioned massive data gathering and analyzing pretty early on.

Yep - if you don't want people seeing your bieberqueries, you should use SSL Google:

https://encrypted.google.com/

... or if you're super paranoid, disable sending referrer in your browser.

Firefox (at least) will still send referrer info when you navigate to a https: site from encrypted Google. You can change this in about:config by changing network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer to false.

Source: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferr...

This.

Its silly to rely on trusting the search engine provider to be secure, better be secure on the client side.

I'm curious if it's possible to write a Firefox plugin that would block the HTTP-REFERRER header for certain sites.

RefControl https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

I'm using it since years and I don't understand all that referrer-privacy hype. Just don't send the referrer.

I recently started using RefControl to get around the nytimes.com block which comes up if the referer isn't google.

For privacy reasons, I set it so it forges the referrer to be the root of the destination site if the domain is different too. So when I go to google.com and click on http://www.example.com/foo, the referer it sends is http://www.example.com/ instead of http://www.google.com/searchterm.

I haven't found any sites which this breaks yet...

You do realize this breaks the ability of www.example.com to track its traffic? They have now lost the information as to how their search rank is performing on Google, and have acquired incorrect information that they think you typed in www.example.com directly.

You're entirely within legal rights to do this, of course. But if everyone did, then sites would have no idea where their traffic is coming from. Morally it is a bit questionable: your browser is blatantly and directly lying to www.example.com about how you got there.

You think a website has a right to track where I came from. I think a user has a right to privacy.

If it is from an adwords campaign, you get the search terms.