How Much Does Google Know About YOU?

An amazing thing about the information age is... well, the amount of information there is. Internet content is growing faster than weeds, than rabbits, than even bandwidth. There are more than 200,000 new domains a day, more domains than words in the largest dictionaries.

But the part that is especially amazing is how much information there is behind the scenes. I mean, the info we don't see.

As a marketing guy, I can call up web stats that tell me not only how many visitors we've had, but where they came from, how long they stayed, which pages they visited. It's useful because it enables us to benchmark improvements to our site. Being in eCommerce, we like seeing these numbers go up, and the only way to tell whether you're gaining or losing is by measuring.

Now when you extrapolate these capabilities of technology, and realize there are lots of people gathering lots of information about lots of other people, one can easily begin to develop a bit of paranoia. Who knows what about me and how much do they know?

There's a good article in this week's Computerworld that begins like this: "Google may know more about you than your mother does. Got a problem with that?"

According to the article by Robert L. Mitchell, Google stores everything. Thus it knows what you search for, it knows what videos you watch, it knows your browser activity if you use the Chrome browser, knows where you have been watching and maybe travelling using Google Maps. If you use Picasa web albums it has all your pictures (all mine from this blog get assembled on Picasa automatically) and it may even have transcripts of telephone calls, though I fail to understand how since my own attempts with voice recognition software were dicey at best.

Mitchell does soften the fear factor a bit. "Technically, of course, Google doesn't know anything about you. But it stores tremendous amounts of data about you and your activities on its servers, from the content you create to the searches you perform, the Web sites you visit and the ads you click.

What Google Knows About You is a good read. The article may be unsettling, but it's helpful to know you what you're getting into when you don't read all those privacy policies you agree to when you sign up for various services. Mitchell also offers a half dozen suggestions to help you protect your privacy a bit.

But then, if you can't help yourself, you might start beginning to wonder... how much does Yahoo know about me? Or, and this is where things start to get scary, the Department of Homeland Security. Hmmm. I don't think I even want to go there.

Scary Realities

A few years ago, I received an unwelcome email from Ohio University, my Alma Mater. Evidently, a hard drive with information about every student from way back whenever was improperly disposed of. My records, including Social Security number and other personal data, happened to have been on this hard drive.

If I recall correctly, the school did take action. (A) They notified us, the potential identity theft victims, and (B) they fired two IT personnel, as if that would somehow help prevent my future identity theft should this info get into the wrong hands.

I graduated Ohio University in 1974. The incident, three decades later, is a somewhat unnerving reminder of how vulnerable we are. How many people have your personal data? How many schools have you attended, places where you have worked, banks that you have done business with, mortgage lenders, hotels that you have stayed at, etc. The list is probably long.

So today, I received a letter from an investment firm through whom I purchased stock securities in the late 1980’s and early nineties. In February of this year one of their boxes of backup tapes of data was evidently missing. The missing tapes contained… guess what? … “certain personal information, such as your name, address, Social Security number and/or shareholder account information.”

Hmmm.

So, they are offering twelve months of “free credit monitoring.” Great… like then what? In thirteen months I will still be anxious because, frankly, though I do not lose sleep over it, I remain internally unsettled by the previous potential dispersal of my personal information four years ago.

From everything I have read, identity theft is an enormous nightmare to experience. Personally, I do not want to go through it any more than I want to catch the latest staph infection that has no remedy.

It’s all part of the game of progress, and I don’t really know the alternatives. Cash and carry has limitations that put a crimp on my style. I dislike shopping, and all those goods that get delivered to my door with a handful of mouseclicks is so pleasing. But… then again… I sure don’t like the way this letter from Shareholder Services is making me feel.

How does it make you feel? Am I overreacting to imaginary boogeymen, or are these really scary realities?