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"The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows about you"
Innuendo:
Sure, they make their money from advertisers. Do they collect and store data to be used by some higher powered big brother to spy on users? Doubtful.-Josh (May 31, 2010, 07:20 AM)
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And what of the companies who are buying the data from Google? Can you vouch for the intentions of these unknown entities as well? I'm sure they are buying data from other sources as well & aggregating and correlating it all. It does not matter if a piece of data is not personally identifiable. Once you get enough pieces of this kind of data regarding a person the correlation of the data makes the data cluster personally identifiable. There have been numerous university studies that have shown this.
Bottom line is if you (or anyone) is not concerned with the data you share with companies that's fine, but don't criticize those of us who do want to keep the knowledge about ourselves private even if you deem that knowledge to be trivial. What's trivial to you may not be to me.
Josh:
Is any of the data personally identifiable or does it point to an IP address? Is there any evidence that the companies purchasing said data are using it for ill-intentioned purposes? Are there any sources to show that someone has taken 200 pieces of data from one IP address and somehow managed to point the info to a single identifiable person? I am not bad mouthing people who are genuinely concerned with the privacy of an individual, where I get annoyed is people telling me I should avoid google and ALL OF THEIR products because of it without any real basis for the comments.
Why is it we are just focusing on Google? Why not Yahoo? Why not Ask.com? Why not the thousands of websites that sell you products and CAN make use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) without having to purchase through google? What about the real people who are trying to exploit your machine and steal information without having to rely on google search hits? Does anyone have any data showing exactly what is stored or what is being shared or is this concern simply BECAUSE WE have made Google so big? We forget that it is the end user who makes a service as popular as it becomes. It is the end user who continues to use a product and asks more of them and in turn has the company in question expand it's services to meet the needs of the end user.
downloder:
Do they collect and store data to be used by some higher powered big brother to spy on users? Doubtful.
-Josh (May 31, 2010, 07:20 AM)
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It only takes a minimal amount of research to find what is being done with the billions of data bits being collected, not only by Google, but also by our wonderful government.
Am I paranoid? Nah. BUT, I do take my anonymity fairly serious. No one needs to know the what/where/why of what I do, unless I choose to divulge it.
Innuendo:
Why is it we are just focusing on Google?-Josh (May 31, 2010, 04:33 PM)
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I am extremely leary of all the companies you mentioned and more, but I think the reason why people focus more on Google is because they are the most successful, they pride themselves on very rarely if ever deleting *anything*, and also pride themselves on their abilities to correlate that data & make it work for them whether it be serving ads or who knows what else.
Another reason people focus more on Google than anyone else is that it seems like 85+% of all web pages I visit report back to either www.googleapis.com, www.googlesyndication.com, www.google-analytics.com, or all of the above. Even when during the course of the day I actively avoid going to Google's sites Google is trying to dip into my business.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the other search engine sites you mentioned don't have equivalents for those three sites mentioned above, do they?
Eóin:
Is there any evidence that the companies purchasing said data are using it for ill-intentioned purposes?
-Josh (May 31, 2010, 04:33 PM)
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Being cautions is all about trying to protect yourself before something like this happens. Waiting until after evidence has emerged would be utter lunacy.
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