What Google knows about you
by Tom Gara
Source:
http://blogs.wsj.com
By: Tom Gara
Source:
http://blogs.wsj.com/
Let’s run through a little thought experiment.
Imagine there’s a list somewhere that contains every single webpage you have
visited in the last five years. It also has everything you have ever searched
for, every address you looked up on
Google GOOG +0.26% Maps, every email you sent, every chat message,
every YouTube video you watched. Each entry is time-stamped, so it’s clear
exactly, down to the minute, when all of this was done.
Now imagine that list is all searchable. And imagine it’s on a clean,
easy-to-use website. With all that imagined, can you think of a way a hacker,
with access to this, could use it against you?
And once you’ve imagined all that, go over to
google.com/dashboard,
and see it all become reality.
For a piece complementing
today’s story on Google and privacy by the WSJ’s Amir Efrati,
I took a deep dive into Google Dashboard, a kind of Grand Central Terminus for
all the information the company has stored on you. It’s a truly amazing amount,
especially if, like me, you have been a heavy Gmail user since its launch in
2004. As long as you are logged into Gmail, or any other Google account, the
company isn’t just keeping track of how you use its own service — it’s noting
every site you visit on the web.
Here’s a snapshot of the kind of data we found on my Google Dashboard, put
together as a graphic for today’s newspaper. It includes my 64,019 Google
searches, and 134,966 Gmail conversations:
A few caveats: First, this data can only be collected when you are logged in
to a Google service. Second, Google gives you options to turn the collection
off, or delete archived data. And third, access to all this information is
password protected. But once you get past the login screen, the amount of
information there is staggering.
The idea that all of this data exists as a mass of ones and zeros deep in a
server farm in California, being studied by disinterested robots to serve up
better search results and more relevant ads, is something most of us can process
in the abstract.
But the fact that it is all viewable right now, on a user-friendly Web page
complete with its own search service (yes, you can run Google searches on your
own web history), is something else entirely. For example, I searched for every
website I’ve ever visited containing the word “octopus.” And yes, the results
were wonderful.
Of course, if somebody else managed to access my Google Dashboard — and the
chances of this happening are well above zero — they could search for things far
less innocent than an eight-tentacled sea creature. The bad possibilities seem
endless, from digital blackmail to much deeper forms of identity theft.
For example, how many people with even marginally public profiles, or
aspirations for public office, would happily hand over a few hundred dollars in
virtual ransom money to a hacker who agreed not to dump our entire web browsing
history online and publicize it?
And how many husbands or wives would pay more to prevent a significant other
from getting a package of edited highlights in the mail? Perhaps an address
frequently searched for on Google Maps, or visited with a location-enabled
Android phone? Any bosses out there who might stump up some cash to prevent
their late night web-surfing habits from becoming an email sent to the entire
office?
There’s another side to this, of course. In the long run our online histories
will become one of our most cherished forms of memory, in some ways far more
powerful than anything our brains are capable of. Gmail was one of the first
Google services we signed into, and that was less than a decade ago. The Chrome
browser has been around less than half as long. Our web histories are still
young.
Give them another ten years and they will paint a picture of our past — of
who we were — more detailed than any memory. Imagine thinking back to a specific
day 20 years ago, and seeing the people we spoke to that day, what we spoke
about, how they looked, the links they sent us, the things we said about them.
We’ll be able to see the places we were on that day, and the photos we took on
our phones, and the people we were with.
Maybe Google’s All Seeing Eye will eventually know things about us —
patterns, gradual changes, small habits — that even we aren’t aware of. It might
see the worst of us, but it could also see the better.
Philip K. Dick hinted at this in
A Scanner Darkly, a 1977 novel well
ahead of its time on matters of the surveillance state. Reflecting on the
omnipresent surveillance devices that surrounded him, the protagonist wonders
(
see here for the
beautifully-done movie version):
“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the
head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use
or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into
me— into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because
I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside;
murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he
thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are
cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead
this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
Here’s to hoping Google, and others, help us see clearly. They certainly have
the data to do so — and this is based on what is being stored prior to the age
of wearable computers in our glasses, self-driving cars, or the
“internet of things”. As time goes on, our Google Dashboards
will tell us more and more about who we are, and who we were.
http://muslimvillage.com/2013/08/10/42421/what-google-knows-about-you/
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