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Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

From https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1319578 :

  > The +1 button isn’t used to track your visits across the web.
  > Google doesn’t keep a persistent record of your browsing
  > history as part of the process of showing you a +1 button or
  > otherwise use the fact that you personally have visited a page
  > with the +1 button.

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Frankly, I don't trust enough to believe they won't change this in the future, or even that they're telling the truth now. Tracking people is the only way Google makes any money.

Agreed. I recently discovered that they even track you when using incognito. e.g. I got a youtube suggestion whilst in incognito that I had searched for 2 weeks prior & the type of search precludes the possibility of it being a co-incidence. So much for no cookies in incognito...

Incognito mode doesn't block cookies, it creates a separate cookiejar. If you have the same incognito session open for two weeks, every cookie from every site you visited still exists. If you want cookie-clearing behavior, you'll have to periodically close your incognito window.

This was with a fresh incognito session, so theoretically there shouldn't be a cookie.

A bit more trial & error shows that its possibly connected via IP...switching IP seems to confuse it.

Actually, that's false. Most of the money Google makes from ads are not behaviorally targeted ads, but keyword targeted. If you subtract out YouTube 'behavior target' which seems more targeted based on what you watched, the portion of money Google actually makes from using 3rd party website tracking is quite small.

Good to know, I'd never seen that before. But still they do keep the records for 2 weeks, and it's not very far-fetched to imagine that it's rolled up into some data store that can be attached to your unique identity (even if it isn't explicitly a record of every webpage one has has visited).

Okay, so the mere _presence_ of the +1 button in a browser doesn't track visits across the web. But when you press the button, "Google receives information about your Google profile, the URL you +1, your IP address, and other browser-related information."

If you click the button, it lights up in red and also shows up in the +1's tab on your plus.google.com profile (which you can make public or private). Since the +1 button is served from Google's servers and displayed via an iframe, Google of course receives client information when you click it. You're making a request to Google's servers.

It sounds like we're saying the same thing. I just was pointing out that this is all entirely consistent with the entire point of G+ being the "further tracking of what's happening on the internet."

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