Blog Marco

We all love our privacy. But with the Internet boom, we tend to rely a lot on the search engines to provide us with the answers we need. But by using these search engines we are giving up a piece of our privacy. Recently, AOL released three months worth of search records from their users. Many of the searches gave a picture, or a story about the user's life. Consider this case:

On April 4, for instance, user 14162375, the melancholy Portuguese-American in Florida, seems to have passed out on the keyboard at 6.20pm, when he asked suddenly: "llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb" then "vvvvbmkmjk" and "vvglhkitopppfoppr".

An hour later he had recovered enough to search for variations on his wife's name - he thought she might have moved to New England. On the evening of April 16, matters came to a head: "My cheating wife", he typed, and then, five times, "I want to kill myself", and then "I want to make my wife suffer", followed quickly by "Kill my wifes mistress", "My wifes ass", "A cheating wife". Two days after that he was back looking for audio surveillance and bugging equipment and four weeks later he seemed to have cheered up and was looking for motorcycle insurance.

Just imagine, every keystroke you put into a search engine is logged. You have no online privacy. The search engines know who you are. What you like. What your interests are. Be scared. Be very scared.

All of this information is stored. Google identifies every computer that connects to it with an implant (known as a cookie), which will not expire until 2038. If you also use Gmail, Google knows your email address - and, of course, keeps all your email searchable. If you sign up to have Google ads on a website, then the company knows your bank account details and home address, as well as all your searches. If you have a blog on the free blogger service, Google owns that. The company also knows, of course, the routes you have looked up on Google maps. Yahoo operates a similar range of services.

All this knowledge has been handed over quite freely by us as users. It is the foundation of Google's fortune because it allows the company to target very precisely the advertising it sends in our direction. Other companies have equally ambitious plans. An application lodged on August 10 with the US Patent and Trademark Office showed that Amazon hopes to patent ways of interrogating a database that would record not just what its 59 million customers have bought - which it already knows - or what they would like to buy (which, with their wish lists, they tell the world) but their income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. The company, of course, already knows who we are and where we live.

Full SMH Article: Spy in Your Computer

Technology + Gadgets | Life. | Marco's blog | bookmark | reddit | cosmos»