Big Brother Google is Watching You

Is Big Brother Google watching you? In a word, yes. This post is not designed to frighten you, only to inform you of what some people are saying that Google is doing with private information about you.

We live in an age where information is synonymous with power. Military victories are more influenced by information about the enemy than any other single factor.

One company more interested in private information about individuals than any other (except maybe for a certain US government agency) is Google. So how do they do it?

Google (and many other websites for that matter) writes a file to your computer called a cookie that uniquely identifies you and uses that unique ID to capture information about you. This is not new and many people delete cookies on their computers to prevent this invasive information capture. Google is on to them.

Other information such as your IP address, browsing habits and other very sneaky methods like browser version are also captured to match your new cookie ID to the one you thought you deleted. The cookie Google writes to your computer’s hard drive does not expire until 2038 according to http://www.google-watch.org/krane.html.

Does this seem far fetched to you? Did you know that Google is one of the leading developers of quantum algorithm technologies? Check out this article at popsci.com http://www.popsci.com. This technology is designed to recognize data objects and sort them incredibly quickly.

It sounds to me like they could be working on a process that helps them reduce the immense database they continue to collect about all of us into an extremely valuable set of data records about each of us that contains such things as name, address, telephone, email, buying habits, credit card activity, travel habits (using data captured from Google Maps and Google Earth) and more information than you can imagine. They have successfully deployed “live traffic” into Google Maps in part by using GPS data collected by hand held devices moving slowly during traffic jams.

Are we living in a time where no matter how we access the internet (home computer, work computer, laptop, smartphone, public library, etc.) Google and others like them can capture information about us individually and then sell this information to the highest bidder? I am afraid the answer to this question is likely yes.

Why does Google hire individuals like Matt Cutts who, according to many sources, formerly worked for the National Security Agency and had top security clearance? It has been reported http://cronespeaks.wordpress.com that Google has worked with intelligence gathering agencies and has provided information to the FBI in certain criminal cases. It can be debated if this is actually true, you decide for yourself.

Searchenginewatch.com http://searchenginewatch.com reports that there are 91 million Google searches every day. That is a lot of opportunity to collect information about us. I guess it really is a brave new world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World.

Here is the official Google Privacy Policy straight off their own website: http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html

If you choose to continue using Google, you may want to change the default privacy settings here:

Go to http://www.google.com

Click on ‘sign in’ at the far right and sign in

Click on settings (next to where you sign in)

Click on ‘Google account settings’

Click on ‘web history’

Click ‘clear entire web history’ to clear your history

Click ‘pause’ to supposedly stop them from collecting your web searches

Some people like having their web history recorded in Google and they use it a little like a bookmarking service, so it is a personal decision whether or not it is something you would like deleted or not.

I don’t want to believe that any of this is true, but the more I read about it, the more it seems like the evidence is supported. What do you think? Is it true or just a conspiracy theory?