22
January
2006
|
17:40 PM
America/Los_Angeles

The Future Transparency of the Past or why you should get used to living in a glass house...

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher


I've been wanting to write this piece for a while and with all the chatter over government subpoena of internet useage data, it seems like this is the right time.


Here is an excerpt of my piece on ZDNet, and my apologies for asking you to click over to ZDNet, but they pay on pageviews and do a better job of monetizing my work than I do! So in the interests of keeping SVW as "advertising-lite" as possible, an occasional click or two over on my ZDNet blog IMHO would be much appreciated by my landlord :-)


An excerpt from "The future transparency of the past."


Did you know that Google keeps a copy of every piece of data it ever comes across? That includes every web page (without images), search terms, and useage data such as time of day, IP address, etc. Google's head of engineering told me more than two years ago that all the data gets saved onto onto tapes and is shipped to a storage facility.

What will you do with that data I asked? We don't know was the answer.

I'm sure that Google's data is not personal to a user, but, if you could combine it with other data, such as from third-party cookies, or other databases, it can get personal very easily. You'll be able to triangulate an identifiable user.

Now combine that ever growing store of data at Google, with the masses of location data from cell phone companies, and credit card companies, and health data, etc. And also all the data that corporations are required to save because of Sarbanes-Oxely.


It would be a big mashup of data, but if you had access to it all–it would reveal a person's life in tremendous detail. You would almost be able to follow the daily track of a person through every minute of their day, as they gassed their car, called their spouse, associated with a person that later was put into prison, called a person later revealed to be their lover, what they wrote that day in corporate emails, what they wrote on blogs and with who they linked.


Okay, it would be a massive data mining project–but. . . we will have such capabilities.


Continue reading...


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Here is one of the related articles on this topic: Online privacy a fragile shield SUBPOENAS MAKE USERS UNEASY ABOUT WHOM TO TRUST By Michael Bazeley Mercury News