The Washington Post’s Leslie Walker has this piece today on how much Google knows about you — and she praises the DOJ for trying to get its hands on Google’s data because that move is a good wake-up call for Internet users. First, regarding the praise:
Rather, the request — and Google’s refusal to fork over its search data — is putting a helpful public spotlight on the vast amount of personal information being stored, parsed and who knows what else by the Web services we increasingly rely on to manage our lives.
In terms of what Google keeps on file, Leslie says it’s a lot in her case because she has turned on Google’s tracking widget, which stores a history of her searches. But, she also notes, Google stores a “tracking cookie” that doesn’t correlate user information with an individual’s search.
This tracking cookie merely stores the date and time of searches plus the user’s IP address. Hello? Google has a record of all Internet searches, and the date and time and originating IP address of every Internet search. Wouldn’t take a lot to mesh those two sets of data together to get everything on everybody, and it’s entirely up to Google to do that.
Walker points this out.
A Google spokesman said that data are not currently correlated with each user’s search query, but Google’s technology and privacy policies would allow the company to do so if it chose.
Cynthia Brumfield at 5:47 PM|Comments(0)
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