flyingrose/privacy

Excerpts from three answers to a question on LinkedIn regarding gmail. You can get to the entire page but not reviews.

From the page: "The part that gets me is how little concern people have with Google and privacy. They can ID you, by IP address, to every single search you make. They keep this data for 18 months or longer. Throw in GMail, where they have your personal information, and they now know the search terms used by a specific person. Couple that with the fact that with a name you can find a tremendous amount of info about a person. There are people using Google checkout where they even have credit card and bank account information...Everyone wants to beat up Microsoft as the "evil empire". Who's looking over Google's shoulder on why they even need most of this information and how is it protecting. Yes, any mediocre DBA can plough through Google's mound of data on the backend and give you a personal profile of each person hitting their services that would scare most people to death. I don't use any of their stuff, because I don't trust them to protect the data, despite the pretty little marketing stuff they put out.

Regarding data mining... I'm not saying that google keeps your mails, I'm saying they are statically processed before reading, before deletion and every time you read it, label it, etc., so probably each word of all your deleted mail is counted and saved in their database... that's in their policy, when they say they save "non personal information" because in one hand no one will be able ever to see your deleted mails, just the amounts of words with some points system information.. I suppouse they give more points to word found in sentences with word "need" and "buy", as well related to the labels you use... but who knows!.

�Who needs this? Google ads. Imagine you always invite people to drink a beer, take an expresso.. whatever... then a good ad for you will be someone that's paying to advertise their expresso coffe machine. I think you get the point right?


Quite simply:

In order for Google to grow it relies on money from advertising.

Archiving the information rather than deleting allows the information to be subject to Googles passive filters and information gatherers.

This allows Google the possibility to see consumer trends in never before seen detail and accuracy.

This trend allows google to more strategically place ad's. And in turn generates more revenue for the publishers and marketers.

My guess is that Google can do this legally because they are not actually reading emails. Therefore Google is not invading privacy. Technically they arnt releasing any information about their clients either becuase its kept internal. In addition marketing and sales has for the most part been about numbers and statistics. With the following technology Google can greatly increase their ad rate statistics.

All Google has done is taken a software package like found on mxlogic.com [mxlogic.com] that scans for and reports something anonymously. For the sake of information google is using 'key word' filters.

The emails are passsing through filters and scanners in a way no different than that of virus and malware/spyware scanners.

Many people may recall a recent decision by the upper court to make individual email providors such as Hotmail and Google bound by the same laws and regulations regarding privacy as telecom companies and other sources the public believes to be private. For the govt. and other organizations to request and obtain emails they must first obtain a search warrent or have probable cause.

Even this decision will unlikely hinder Googles manipulation of the system for its personal gains. I fear that without regulation on this issue more people and businesses will start to manipulate the system for personal and commerical gains to a point that will ultimately cause one form or more of mass consumer manipulation.

I am not an SEO and do not advocate any black-hat methods. I link this post in to help others become more aware of what is being tracked. I have consistently noticed that when I personally attempt to explain the power of data mining that most do not understand the dangers.

It is NOT the data itself that concerns me; it is the faulty conclusions that can be (and frequently ARE) drawn from data that is inaccurate to begin with - data that is fine for marketing purposes but dangerous to use to judge others.

THAT is my largest concern - that individuals will suffer serious negative consequences that are totally unnecessary and illogical.

Google tracks you - or whomever they THINK is you - and THAT is a very important distinction - whether you are logged in or not.

From the page: "Google's Patents say a lot ...

I won't quote here but they say they will use any methods they have in order to rank a site best. This means they will use data gathered from crawling and user experience data.
How can google spy on you?

* Do you use Webmaster Tools and did you add all your sites to your account?
* Do you use Search History so they can track all your searches and click throughs?
* Do you use Google Analytics?
* Do you stay logged in your Webmaster Tools account while doing searches?
* Do you use Google Desktop Applications?
* Do you use the Google Toolbar?
* Do you check the PR of your Sites in bulk?
* Do you use Google AdSense?
* Do you use Google Accounts in any way?
* Do you use Google Reader?"

I mention data mining and privacy issues fairly often. Check out this directory to find out just what data mining can do. Search on your own name and those of others you're interested in and see how much is available about you online.

Then remember that the information about you available in "private" databases is many times greater. Those databases are rapidly being consolidated. The cure for the fear of your possible negative past history is to not care. It only has as much power over you as you give it.

A couple things to remember:
1. There are far more people with the same name than you can imagine. I posted a link to howmanyofme.com [howmanyofme.com] where you can find out how many.
2. pipl has lots of information but it isn't necessarily going to show the best or more current first. If you have an Internet business it would be best to provide an easily findable way to offer this information yourself.

From the page: "The House version of the bill that passed the Judiciary Committee yesterday did not give the telecoms amnesty. Today, the ACLU says that the Senate version of the bill does include amnesty."

Time for a little pushback. Here are the names and numbers of Senators on the Intelligence Committee drafting the bill. Give them a call and tell them, �oeNo telecom amnesty!” (Those in bold need a bit of an extra push.)"

From the page: "Google Web History - My Experience - As I wrote two days ago, I took Google Web History for a test drive. Here is what I found:

1. Even though I signed for Google Web History on April 23rd, my history went back to April 25 2006. Not sure how that happened, I think it has sometime to do the google personalized search. It had all the searches and the sites I clicked in history dating back to April 25 2006.

2. Google Web History as a spy tool? - I signed on a computer which my wife and I both use. I forgot to signoff from my Google account and my wife started using it. I went back to my personal laptop, signed into my Google account again and started looking at web history. Guess what? I could see what my wife was searching on and the sites she was visiting. Pretty freaky huh? Maybe you can use google web history to check on what kids are doing online."

I just blogged about this earlier and then came across this post. This is yet another example of flawed logic. Web history is only accurate if only ONE person with ONE Google login ever uses that PC.

If anyone else ever uses your computer or any login you have for anything - that history is inaccurate at best. It is far too easy to accidentally be putting information into someone else's history.

If used on a "witch hunt" - could potentially hang every one of us. That is the problem with judgmental thinking, poor logic skills, and black-and-white thinking.

From the page: "imagine that you're using someone else's computer to do some work or just to mess around and then when your done they can see everything you've done, regardless of whether you cleared cookies, and cache...because it's linked to the google account and not simply the browsers temp data. Here's the real world example where one of the early adopters and let his wife use his computer and afterwards saw everything she did. The alternative is equally true that if you have the service turned on and someone fires up your browser then they can start looking through everything you've searched on for the last year or two, as well as see what kind of sites you frequent...

I'm probably being paranoid, but considering all of the identity theft and other data related scares, it seems a bit much to have that much data floating around...especially if the government gets involved using the Patriot Act."

Only those who are technical enough realize the power of data mining and how many ways there are to scrape information. Email and messages sent online are NOT private. Who is reading yours?

From the page: "I sent myself a Gmail, as I often do, for note-taking purposes. Subject heading: Domain Name Idea. Body: siamesemushroom.com [siamesemushroom.com] . Maybe I'll buy it when I get home, I thought.

I messaged my wife using MSN Messenger, asking her what she thought. She agreed that it sounded kinda funky, giving me the greenish light to go buy. Then, a couple of minutes later, she messaged me again:

It's a fake site. Link list.

I checked the URL, and saw what's there now. One of those waste of webspace piece of junk linkfarms, the scourge of any genuine domain name collector (for the record, I don't have very many - I just appreciate, enjoy, and use them). How strange, I thought. I checked the whois info, and voil� ! Bought today.

Today! Never mind the odds of searching whois info on the day a domain name is bought, but a day when I e-mailed the exact URL to myself? Memories of "Google's getting creepy"� articles flood back into consciousness. Don't worry about the ads that pull keywords from your e-mail, they say. No one's reading them, they say. I'm familiar enough with Google's ad tools to know that it makes sense, but clearly this isn't normal. I know this isn't exactly a major incident, but it's most certainly noteworthy.

What am I missing? Is there a hole somewhere? I've never searched the .com itself in Google, to avoid clicking on someone's site and my search ending up appearing in their tracking info, just in case. Either something's up with Moniker, MSN messenger, or Gmail (or my wife e-mailed her secret contact in the Caribbean, who bought it before I could). If this is somehow my fault, I'd like to know, and so should everyone else who operates at all like I do. I'm not suggesting that a domain name coincidence is evidence of the technologically dominant group tracking us in order to take us over and rule the planet, but I find the circumstances most certainly steps in the wrong direction. At a minimum, it's a relevant, practical nuisance. Any thoughts? Other than that I should stop blogging and get back to work."

More than a few are very aware of the potential dangers of a too-powerful Google and the data they control. They are not immune to the consequences of their actions.

From the page: "while Google has almost overnight become a trusted source of information for the technologically attuned, few have thought to question the extent to which its success poses threats to both our privacy and our aspirations for the positive potential of the Internet."