Even though the government has demanded no personal information — only
a list of Web queries divorced from the names of those submitting them
— Google is resisting partly on grounds that turning over the data
might create a public perception that it would readily cough up
personal factoids, if asked.
The Justice Department may have done us all a
big favor by issuing subpoenas to Internet search engines to find out
what people are researching online.
Not
because that data could help shield children from online porn, which
was the government’s stated goal in demanding data from Google and
three other search firms.
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.
Even though the government has demanded no
personal information — only a list of Web queries divorced from the
names of those submitting them — Google is resisting partly on grounds
that turning over the data might create a public perception that it
would readily cough up personal factoids, if asked.
So that raises the question: What, exactly, does Google know about us?
In my case, a lot.
Permission to snoop
I’ve
done a great deal of beta testing of Google services, including Gmail,
Orkut social networking, Froogle shopping lists, personal search and a
custom home page. Most are linked by my Gmail address and account name.
Google
has a wealth of data about me, especially through its personal search
service, a tool that only collects data on you if you elect to turn it
on, as I have.
That
service gives me — along with Google, and maybe the government should
it ever suspect me of a crime — access to every query I’ve typed while
signed into Google, organized by a clickable calendar.
Clicking
on "Nov. 3" produces a page listing all 27 queries I submitted while
signed into Google that day. I’m not sure I’d want the government to
see the ones on "panties" and "underpants." (Sorry, but I’m not going
to tell you why I entered those words, except to say it was unrelated
to porn.) And it’s no one’s business why I looked up "Herman Miller
chair," "redhead" or "Ocean City" either.
My
stored history is so detailed it shows I clicked on none of the results
from those queries, but I did click on results from four searches that
day. The five sites I visited are even listed.
Google
doesn’t keep such detailed data on anonymous users who don’t sign in.
Unless users tweak their Web browser settings, Google stores a
"tracking cookie" or small file on each user’s computer to store items
such as the address of their computer, type of Web browser used, and
date and time of each query submitted.
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.
Search histories already are creeping into
criminal trials. A North Carolina man, Robert Petrick, who was
convicted in November of murdering his wife, ran suspicious Internet
searches immediately before and after she was dumped in a lake. His
queries? "Body decomposition," "rigor mortis," "neck," "snap" and
"break," along with topics relating to the depth of the lake where her
body turned up.
Those
searches were stored on the hard drives of the computers Petrick used,
but they could just as easily have been stored by Google had Petrick
turned on the archiving feature that I use.
A window to what?
Our
personal search histories are highly sensitive information — and
obviously open to misinterpretation — because they offer such a unique
view into what we are thinking. Most of us routinely ask Google
questions about religion, social behavior, sex, work — whatever pops
into our heads.
And
those queries are mere rocks in a growing mountain of profiling data
about us being compiled by many other Web services, not just Google.
Over at Amazon, hackers or government investigators might have a field
day if they gained access to the 171 items on my supposedly private
"wish list." (I’m too lazy to ever delete anything, and I use Amazon’s
wish list as a bookmarking tool.)
It’s
one thing for our personal data to be stored on our own computers,
which theoretically we could erase (a harder task than it seems,
actually) whenever we choose. It’s quite another to have so much
personal activity logged and analyzed by distant, impersonal Web sites.
There is simply no telling how much long-term control we are giving up
over our digital reputations in these still-early days of the Web.
So
if the government scares people into thinking more about their own
Internet histories by slapping subpoenas on the search engines, maybe
that’s not a bad thing.
