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Random: Information For You. And Anyone Else.
Posted December 18, 2007 9:35 AM
Congratulations Americans, the polls are in and apparently we're all more conceited! A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project said about 47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine. Now that could just mean that people are curious about what information is available about themselves online where any person can access it, but what it does mean is that we want to research ourselves. The internet knows all so why wouldn't it know all about you and I?
The scary thing is that it does. It's mostly Google leading the information boom, remembering every search forever and the computer it came from for 18-24 months. Users of Google's e-mail, calendar, word processor, spreadsheets and reader share far more information with the company than just searches too. The Gmail computers "read" every e-mail and use keywords to choose what advertisements to show customers. Even some Google Calendar settings let anyone view a user's schedule. Google Docs and Spreadsheets store everything in Google computers, while Google Reader keeps a copy of every news story and blog post that users see. They're even able to track every Web site that users visit and index every file inside their computers. Now that's scary stuff. Even more frightening are the heavy Google users, effectively share their entire lives with company computers: credit card numbers, bank balances, love letters, travel destinations, book purchases, medical concerns, anything and everything that comes in contact with Google. Their data isn't as much a point of worry as every other place that you've given personal information to. For 2005, 2006, and 2007 there are reports for personal information stolen. Whether you're worried that your information was stolen or not it's still worth checking out to understand the scope of information availability.
Obviously it's not people being conceited when they search for themselves. Give it shot, try the search box in the bottom left corner of the site.
Tags: information, technology, guyville, America, conceited, search, database, saved, stolen, identity,
