Google's main business has been, since Day One in fact, about data mining. The first database that they had collected and mined had in fact been one of website information - contents, popularity, etc.

This is, in fact, how every single search engine was *supposed* to work, in theory, until Google came along to attempt and perfect the process.

Their further business ventures are merely an extension of their central premise - that mining public data, and to an extent private data. The question remains, of course, is what they do with it - and what they can legally do with it.


Now, let's go offtrack for a moment, and explore the wonderful world of online stores. Each and every store holds your credit card data, knows where you live, and knows your purchase information to further enhance that ability. The bigger ones (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ebay, etc) all take the extra step and build a browsing database based on your user cookie to show you products that you're more likely to be interested in on the site's homepage.

This is their way of trying to earn an extra buck off you.

Now, at the very least, the above people know where you live. In theory, they also know your credit card information. In practice, to avoid being sued and to make the home user feel slightly more secure, they encrypt your connection with them when you pass actual private data, and further encrypt the information in their databases so that, in theory, no one working for these companies can actually access the info. This is standard practice for any online store's database, because they *don't* want the employees to steal your credit info. That leads to trouble - lawsuits, losing customers, a big hit to the reputation and loss of future revenue.


So, do you trust online stores? You can always take the extra paranoid step and use just physical stores... that can record your credit information just as easily, should they ever want to. And at the very least, record you in a client database (been there, done that).


So, back to Google. In their data mining ventures, Google first and foremost builds automatic software - robots, if you will - that sift through huge amounts of data collected to build some kind of personalized database per user. This is still "private" data, in that the general statistics remain anonymous, and the per-user bots only work on a per-user basis. To take the example of Gmail, *every single* online e-mail provider has your email information by definition. Their servers are full of your private information, like it or not. You, the customer, in fact take them up on their free offer (or pay them for the service) of a storage and propagation center for your personal correspondence.

So, in theory, any and every employee of any and every email provider can sift through your private data... if it wasn't encrypted in the databases by default, that is, along with your user info - they "key" to your private part in the database. Google Mail just takes the extra step of building you a bot to mine your data and give you a news feed and commercials based on your interests - as seen from your correspondence.

Their future ventures are build along the same lines. So... is there room for corruption here? Is there potential for some employee who knows how to work the system to gain access to your browsing history, interests, personal information that can then be used against you in some kind of blackmail scheme?

Abso-doo-da-lutely. So Google had better put in security measures in place (though I'm sure they have plenty as it is), give some assurances regarding just what it can or can't do with the data, and those assurances had better be legally binding. And that's that.


As for Google Maps, Google Earth, or StreetView... Meh to thah. That's actually the least of our concerns - they're taking pictures in public streets, and if it means someone gets on the picture in the street when he really doesn't want to be there... well... there had better be a law about that in his country, because Google is by far not the only public entity to take pictures in the street. Google has to obey legal standards on a per-country basis, which is why there are quality limitations to the sat pictures, and even direct changes to the real scenery for security purposes (there's a lovely green park in Tel-Aviv where the IDF central command should actually be), and they're just as limited by privacy laws on a per-country basis.

So if your country's legal code demands that you give your consent before appearing on a picture, then Google must remove it - which they have when prompted. Best solution would be to start blurring faces when the pictures are taken in countries with laws that demand consent on being in a picture taken for public use.

But when such laws don't exist... tough. It's not Google's fault though. If anything, it's the fault of the general public.



Now, back to credit card information again. Google is *never* going to offer to enter your credit card info for you for one simple reason - it can't. There are clear rules on online purchases. Google will probably be able to offer customers sales commercials, but from that to filling in the purchase confirmation for you... big no-no. The kind of no-no that get you lawsuits not just from customers, but possibly from the credit companies as well.



If you're really concerned about the Google cookie, you just need to delete it periodically - there are scripts for that sort of thing. Web computers in secured organizations (military, government, and the smarter corporations) kill the cookies in timed intervals. Don't like Gmail's internal data mining? Don't use it. Same with Google Groups. Alternatives exist, though they're often less convenient.

In terms of actual data available, every single ISP on the planet can have all the data it could possibly want about you. An engineer with a laptop can probably intercept most of your passwords that pass over the supposedly "encrypted" connection with a simple Man-In-The-Middle attack, because most authentication methods that pass before the encryption phase on the net are total shite. And if not that, then how shall I put this... well... brute force attacks on hash codes are becoming easier by the day, which means that the encryption used by most banks today is becoming quite amusing in its obsolescence. It's just a matter of time and computation power - and infecting several thousand computers worldwide to serve as slaves for your main process really brings multi-threaded processing to a whole new level.

So at the end of the day, we take our chances because we like living in the ease and comfort of the Information Age. We like having everything pop up on our screen in a split-second. We've gotten used to it. And frankly, going to the Paranoid Underground is not really my cup of tea, nor is that of the vast majority of the world's population. We'll take our chances and hope that the people giving us services aren't stupid enough to screw-up, thus losing us as sources for revenue.

And that, really, is that.