Okay, I admit Google is my preference for, well, pretty much everything I want to find. Haven’t used a different search engine in months, perhaps longer. But tonight, for some reason, I realized how much Google really does know about me. It’s kinda scary when you add the publicly available information along with my personal information perpetually stored on Google servers as I use the Google Tools to keep track of my settings and history from nearly any computer I use – and am logged in.
iGoogle is the place I call home, although I wish they would have done my.google.com instead – I guess I had a myYahoo page for so long that I was really kind digging that. The whole my thing, it’s kinda corny, but nice and friendly, right? So, back to my story…. I utilize iGoogle to the point that I have multiple tabs with varying content on my page. Nerd, right?
Okay, well, I have to admit I actually need to add more pages as I have found myself wandering to my old ‘MyYahoo’ page to find stories and such that aren’t necessarily on my iGoogle page(s). But it shouldn’t be – Google knows nearly EVERYTHING about me! Even remembering which tab I was on last is what made me think tonight. It is such a simple part of the whole scheme, but really made me think about how much data – let alone my position – they are actually storing.
While Google has made recent disclosures and modifications to their privacy policy so they dump user information in an expedient manner so the Feds don’t have years to read through all of your chat logs and such, you still have to wonder, is it all about the ads?
If I was Google, it certainly would be. Ads are the big cheese in their company – pulling in so much revenue it’s really mind boggling. If I could tap the resource of user behavior, recent search activity, pages visited, ensure to notate pages which have been bookmarked or enclosed within an email message would be given more ‘points’ – there is so much they can do. And should do.
And that’s what scares me. My own realizations of how powerful click-stream data is in these digital times.
Wow.
