Privacy

32482 readers

206 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Does Google uses Google Chrome users to discover new unindexed pages? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by Fijxu@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is not a long post, but I wanted to post this somewhere. This may be useful if someone is doing an article about Google or something like that.

While I was changing some things in my server configuration, some user accessed a public folder on my site, I was looking at the access logs of it at the time, everything completely normal up to that point until 10 SECONDS AFTER the user request, a request coming from a Google IP address with Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html user-agent hits the same public folder. Then I noticed that the user-agent of the user that accessed that folder was Chrome/131.0.0.0.

I have a subdomain and there is some folders of that subdomain that are actually indexed on the Google search engine, but that specific public folder doesn't appear to be indexed at all and it doesn't show up on searches.

May be that google uses Google Chrome users to discover unindexed paths of the internet and add them to their index?

I know it doesn't sound very shocking because most people here know that Google Chrome is a privacy nightmare and it should be avoided at all times, but I never saw this type of behavior on articles about "why you should avoid Google Chrome" or similar.

I'm not against anyone scrapping the page either since it's public anyways, but the fact they discover new pages of the internet making use of Google Chrome impressed me a little.

Edit: Fixed a typo

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

So how did you stop the referer header from doing that. I'd imagine it to be a clear simple command since it ought to be. Or was it not that straightforward?

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

It's easier now that there are some control headers for it. At the time I tried a lot of things like bouncing through javascript opening a new window. Results varied by browser. The simplest way was to inconvenience users a bit by supplying text urls for them to paste into the nav bar, instead of clickable links.