Google, the Big Brother

(A)Tipical Day?

Its morning, you get to your computer, go check the gmail, ah there’s some some news fotos on web picasa from a friend, lets check them out…
Then, whats new today? lets check some rss feeds from the google reader and by the way, how is the real world doing? lets check the google news, humm this is interesting, lets do some browsing on it. Open google search …
search, search, search …

Lunch time, check gmail again, then the gtalk inside the browser pop’s up with a friend asking how you doing, you make a little talk….
Lets take also a peek at how the stock options doing on google finance.
search, search, search …

Its late afternoon, you scheduled a dinner, humm, exactly where is that restaurant street?, lets check google maps, (or google earth for an even cooler experience), you find out exactly where is the restaurant, even add a placemark…

Get back home from dinner, download you digital camera pictures onto computer, upload them into web picasa, make a blog post(on google blogger) showing a picture from that night adding some comments where you where, and what you did, and who you where with. Check your mail again, your friend saying, check this new cool youtube video, lets check that out, and maybe 1, 2, 3… 15 more …

Besides all these you might also use google for making your home page, share documents, share a calendar, google analytics for collecting your web site usage statistic, google desktop search to make fast searches on your computer? google shopping, google images, etc, etc…

So overall, how many google applications are you using? how much information does google has or can potentially have about you? Of course, even if it looks in theory that is possible to collect and analyze all this data, in practice ends up being a big hard and complex work… anyway… we can only imagine …

But from a data mining perspective, this is very exciting, imagine the knowledge existing in all the mails you get, the newsletters, the fotos you make, the places you look at in the world, where you go, what images you search about, what you click on, what are your interests, what you blog about, what news you subscribe, maybe some information on what you work on, what videos you see, and maybe some information of your school, with google desktop indexing all documents…its endless, your agenda, your shopping habits, etc etc etc etc.

Soon, google knows more about you than you do, imagine the ultimate google application:

Me: Show me what’s new today!
Google: Top 3 news according to your interests:
  • New Apple MacBook Air.
  • Ruby 1.9 released.
  • Estonia weather, on 19 January: Sun is shinning, with 24º ! [maybe hoax]

Me: Entertain me!
Google: Do you want to?
  • Play a Joe Satriani cd.
  • watch a Seinfeld episode.
  • Check out a chocolate cake recipe…
  • Buy a chocolate cake …

Me: What is my favorite color, movie, drink?
Google: black, simpsons, coffee!

Google: Hey!!
Me: yes?
Google: haven’t you forgot to pay your water bill? And also your gradma birthday is in 3 days!
Me: humm … ops ….
Google: Maybe you want to check out this cooking book(link), 13 recipes contain ingredients your grandma likes... and shipping cost free to her address area...

3 comments:

Erki Esken said...

Dude, stop scaring people :)

But that's why I enabled Google History, so I could see what Google gets to know about me from my searching habits.

And sometimes I just use another browser instance that clears cache and cookies when closing. It's a clean sheet to start from every time, so hopefully Big G and others have lesser possibility to link my actions in that browser to my person.

Unknown said...

Google is an orchestrated attack on earth. GOOGLE stands for Great Off-world Orchestration for Gigantic Lashing of Earth.
(Oh man.. the time i took to come up with this crap).

Nice post by the way ;)

Alexandre Martins said...

Found this one, has political campaign but relates to data mining privacy issues:

http://aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf

Quoted from site: "The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits. They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Bush Administration's policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society."