All Governments Will Soon Know Your Google History
September 5th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
Deceiving it is. You’re sitting in front of your computer in a dimly lit room. It is ten in the evening, you’re relaxing after a long day and all is well. Sipping your cup of tea with one hand you’re typing in a few keywords into Google thinking it’s just you and that old dusty monitor on your desk.
Well I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the keywords you’re using to search in Google are being stored and no matter what country you’re in your Government will soon know all they need to know about you based on this information.
Posted via ThreadWatch this weekend the Washington Post released Google to Give Data to Brazilian Court.
A few months ago the United States Justice Department wanted Google to hand over billions of queries to them under the premise it was to assist in solving the growing issue of children accessing pornography. Google rightfully refused.
Now Google has been ordered by the Brazilian Government to hand over their data for Google’s Social networking site, Orkut. (A Brazilian version of Myspace). The reason according to the Post, they want to track down users who are taking part in communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia.
The post continues on to quote David Sobel, Senior Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington
Suppose the Chinese government sought the identities of people who visited dissident Web sites? Or the Iranian regime wanted to identify those who posted material critical of Islam?
What I personally find scary is the amount of private information one can find just from search engines storing user’s keyword searches.
While in San Jose last month at the Search Engine Strategies Conference I was sitting in the hotel bar with some very talented and well known search engine marketers. (Thanks to the super talented Dillsmack). As soon as word got out that some unauthorized America Online employees released millions of members search engine queries to the public, we found the database and downloaded parts of it.
What was so significant about this was the fact that the employees who released the data went so far as to hide the member’s user names by replacing them with unique identifying numbers. With a laptop and a little ingenuity of a few guys drinking beer in a bar, we were able track specific private queries to actual AOL member’s.
In fact, after tracking the member’s queries, we were able to go so far as to find the member’s home addresses.
Before you start thinking we were able to do this because we “understand” how to decipher such information, a reporter from the New York Times tracked down user No. 4417749.
No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything.”
As you will see by reading this article, after tracking down this 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., they questioned her on her searches. I could only imagine the surprise Thelma Arnold got when the reporters tracked her down.
So what does this mean for you, the average surfer with nothing to hide?
I guess that depends on who has access to this information. Right now all the major Search Engines store our private data for “marketing purposes”. But sure enough governments will find a way for them to get their hands on it and it is up to each government on how they decide to use it.
One gentleman I met this past weekend said he was sure the US Government already has this private data as they continue to monitor our networks. My response to this was that I don’t think the United States Government has the resources to track things on this level. I am sure they can target specific users and track them but there is just way too much data being transferred via the World Wide Web for them to decipher it all. That’s why the DOJ originally went after Google.
Knowing this, I wonder if users of the Internet in France and Germany would still consider using Quaero?
Europe’s Quaero Project Aims to Challenge Google
Some Europeans are concerned about US hegemony in the worldwide information market. Now France — and maybe Germany — aims to develop a Eurocentric alternative to the dominant Internet search engine, Google.
September 6th, 2006 13:33
There goes the neighborhood!
September 7th, 2006 13:01
Nothing surprising or new to me. I believe everything we do online is being spied and watched by some CIA or FBI or some stupid people like them who just cant help wasting their precious time.