Google as a Model for Governments
Ahmadijenad’s government has announced a bill which forces all Iranian webloggers to register their information in a web site so government can track them later if they write anything that government doesn’t like. Obviously everyone is against it and it is even against the Iran’s constitution law and government will have a hard time to enforce it, but interestingly while we protest such request, at the same time we are volunteer to provide much more information about ourselves to others.
Just think if someone at Google wants to know ’something’ about me, what he ‘can’ know?
- By reviewing my Gmail account s/he can read almost all of my non-business emails. Remember Gmail’s policy is archiving all the emails and never deletes anything from its database.
- Once Google catches my IP address, will know about my searches: what I was looking for, how important it was for me (by amount of time I spent for it), and what I learned about it (by tracking my clicks).
- From Orkut can know who are my friends, the communities I joined, see my latest photos an even what was my Halloween custom last year! He can understand some of my habits as well (such as my interest to explore strangers’ photo albums!)
- By tracking my account at YouTube will know more about my interests, and how much time I spent for it and when (For those who wonder why Google should pay more than $1.5 billion to buy YouTube).
- From Google Talk will know who I call, when, for how long.
- From Google Talk an Gmail will now about my chats, its time and its content.
- From Google Alert will know what is really important for me that I monitor the web and news for it.
- From Google Reader knows what what are my information resources and what I check usually on a daily basis.
- From Blogger (that I was using until recently) with a good estimation will know what has been in my mind in a given time that I shared with others in my weblog).
- From Google Analytics knows about my personal and business websites, their subject and content, number of visitors, etc.
- From Google AdWords will have a good estimation of the budget I spent on advertisement and it leads to a fairly good estimation on my company size.
I should change my question to What Google can ‘not’ Know About Me. Poor those guys in Iranian government who are struggling to gather the information they want and they never could make it!