Posts: 8,803
Name: Steven Bradley
Location: Boulder, Colorado
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The can track you as long as you've signed into any Google property. If you have a gmail account they can track you. If you use personalized search (iGoogle) they can track you. Do you use Google Reader? Picassa? Anything Google?
Once you're signed in they'll set a cookie on your end that can track where you go until you clear the cookie.
A log of information can be learned about you from the searches connected to a single IP address. In the AOL case a woman in Georgia was identified solely from knowing that she was the one who made a series of searches. A New York Times reported was able to track her down within 24 hours after seeing only a number of searches all assigned to the same person.
It doesn't take all that much data to identify you with a reasonable amount of accuracy.
In addition to the above ways you can be identified Google is hoping to acquire DoubleClick, an company that serves ads across the web. Assuming the deal goes through Google will have access to a lot more data about us than any other source.
I'm not entirely concerned with Google trying to sort through all that information, but they could and there are many ways they could profit with it. Even if they don't there's still the issue of that data being released accidentally or someone breaking into their servers and getting access to it. |
