Google is Watching You

[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury News, AUTHOR: John Battelle]
[Commentary] While search is an extraordinary service, we're almost laughably early in its development -- and even earlier in understanding the many ways that search is changing our lives. Using the Web opens worlds of information to us, and in many ways makes it easier to make decisions, forge contacts and transact business. But as more and more information about us moves into the digital realm, we might want to ask whether there are downsides riding along with all those conveniences. Turn search inside out and you'll get a taste of some far-reaching implications. Search companies are increasingly capable of tracking our every move online, in effect monitoring our "clickstream.'' Because we are increasingly moving our digital lives from the constraints of the PC to the relatively boundless Web, we also are creating virtual profiles of ourselves. Hundreds of millions of us store our e-mail, photographs, social networks, contact databases and personal journals on the Web, and we are adding to that pile at an extraordinary rate. Put together the bread crumbs we leave as we navigate the Web with the mountain of personal information we've posted there, and add to that the e-mails we send and receive, and you have an enormous storehouse of data available to the search companies. All this raises some rather interesting privacy questions, ones our society has yet to fully address. What protects our privacy is trust. We have decided that we can trust our government with the information we give it -- there are checks and balances in place, at least, and we know that the government can be held accountable in the end. At least we think that's the case. But what of our relationship with corporations? Like it or not, most of us are now in a relationship of trust with our Internet service provider, our search engine and our e-mail provider.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/13164748.htm