news from Google

Seth Mattinen sethm at rollernet.us
Sat Dec 12 02:44:09 UTC 2009


JC Dill wrote:
> Seth Mattinen wrote:
>>  Hell, all you gmail users on this list right now are feeding the 
>> machine with all our data.
>>
>> The part that gets me: everyone seems happy with this. 
> 
> This list has public archives that are already crawled and archived by 
> Google.  For example:
> 
> http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/threads.html
> http://seclists.org/nanog/2009/Dec/434
> 
> Subscribing to the list with a gmail account doesn't change anything 
> about what Google knows about the list or list members.
> 

Those URL's don't seem to include "google.com" in them. Maybe I'm 
misreading them. Crawlers can be excluded with robots.txt if so chosen 
by the site owner so long as google respects said file. Some lists also 
respect a "no archive" header that some people choose to include with 
their messages.

Preventing my email to gmail from entering their vast database of 
whatever they track doesn't have any such control features that I'm 
aware of. If there are, I'll stand corrected.

~Seth




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