The Google product manager responded to TechCrunch saying "no blocking, hijacking, or filtering" and responded on privacy with "Collected data includes IP address (up to 48 hours, to detect malicious behavior against the service), ISP information and geographic information (2 weeks each). The data is not correlated with your Google account in any way."
It may not be correlated, but that doesn't mean that Google isn't getting a ton of commercial benefit from this data. It's like having your own Alexa/Quantcast, but in realtime, and with much better granularity.
I agree. I also think it's fair for the provider of a public service to derive some benefit from running it. The obvious questions are: Is it ethical? Is it honest? (Google phrases it as "Don't be evil.")
In this case, if they are providing an alternative to filtering and hijacking, I see that as a really important step forward. The fact that a lot of people expected those behaviors shows just how bad the situation with DNS really is these days.
Furthermore, they tend to open source a lot of their stuff, so they don't have to be the only way to Chat, Wave, Browse, and probably eventually DNS.
Re:Google Public DNS
by jasonwatkinspdx on Thursday December 03, 2009 @06:20PM
(#975457)
And an even more biased population :/
We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.
It sounds like a good faith effort aimed at speeding things up to me.
Just to be fair, 25% is a small subset, and if all the chrome installations use it as their default DNS, they'd have quite a lot of data.
I agree, but said data would be a sample from a user base that is far from the general user base of the internet, and Google's user base too. Data from Chrome browsers only would be heavily skewed.
Yea, because your ISP totally wouldn't do the same thing.
I suppose the ISP can do that anyway, no matter what you do. Even if you use Google DNS, your ISP can still know where you surf to.
The point most people miss is that all of your habits and information are under one roof and only need one subpoena to get your entire electronic life on DVD. This just adds to what they already know about your searching, emailing , communicating and spending.