How Could Google Store Everyone’s Life

Let’s make a break for one moment and think about what Google is building while you’re reading this article. I’m not here to say bad things about this company. I appreciate the good work and services that it produces but I can’t help but thinking about the possible consequences of all this.

Let’s suppose you’re a “perfect” user of Google services:

1. So First, to exist on the web you need you personal email address. Let’s use Gmail. From this point you also get connected to google talks to discuss with your friends and colleagues.
2. You’ve probably uploaded your personal (and maybe professional) pictures to your online albums using Picasa.
3. You write all your documents, letters to the online office software suite proposed by Google.
4. When you look for something on the web, you use Google. Thus the word you type could be traced easily using a cookie.
5. Then you could visit any website showing a Adsense/Adwords/doubleclick. The probability of this to happen is quite high as Google is now leader on web advertising.
6. When you search something on a website, it might be using in fact the google search engine.
7. You talk about all your personal life on your blog hosted by Google.
8. You own some websites and maybe have a website for your company. So you use Google Adsense or Doubleclick to get more revenue.
9. You also use google analytics to monitor the success of these websites.
10. You look for you favorite product through Froogle (or Google product search).
11. Your patent(s) is indexed by Google.
12. Your public programming code is indexed by Google and your name is of course in the comments.
13. All your meeting, event and tasks are saved in google Calendar.
14. And last but not least: You use google checkout to pay or receive money on the web.
15. You can use many other services of course (google reader, google maps, etc.)

Now let’s suppose that all this is stored (for part of it it is for sure stored) either with cookies or directly on google servers. Having access to all the data generated would lead to an incredible power. Let’s try to dress up a precise profile of the previous person based on what has been collected:

Personal details

- retrieved directly from main Google user account:

• First, Last Name and password
• Zip Code, Country
• IP adresses of your different connections which leads to:
  • Your location at that time (not very precise I admit)
  • Your Internet Provider
  • All the anonymous (without being logged in) searches you did through the search engine (See “retrieved from search engine” section)

- retrieved from picasa web album

• lots of picture of you and your family, friends, etc.
• Time and location of where you were on vacation, etc.

- retrieved from the search engine / Froogle / Google check out

• what you are interested in or what you like.
• what you visit and at which frequency.
• what you bought recently and for how much.
• your credit card number
• your address

- retrieved from emails, talks and blog

• Everything about you and more that you talked about (life, personal info, exchanged documents, passwords, opinion, friends info, business info, etc).

- retrieved from your documents

• It could be anything depending on how much you’ve written or uploaded in the google spreadsheet space (confidential documents, salary document, payments, business plan, love letter, banking accounts, patents, etc.).

- retrieved from google adsense / adwords / analytics / doubleclick

• Everything to know about your Internet website business (income, number of visits, etc.)

- retrieved from google calendar

• Where you go and what time.
• What is your agenda.
• Who you are meeting and when.

I’m not going into details here as it would get boring and horrible to read because almost everything could be stored. And off course some information could be put together and information can be merged with other users’ details. Even if you’re not a subscriber of Google services, you might have talked over email for instance to a Google subscriber so some of your private info could also be stored.

Today no one knows if Google is using (or will be using) these data or not but one thing cannot be denied is that all this could be and is probably stored somewhere across the huge amount of servers that Google owns. And we have to keep in mind that the aim of Google business model is to sell more ads so all this data is very useful to target advertisement (it is done off course with adsense, gmail etc.).

This brings lots of question to my mind: What is the price of such database ? What would happen if all or part of this database was stolen ? Would you use this information if you were google and you were in the process of hiring this person ? What would people say if Microsoft Windows saved all your hard disk on Microsoft databases (which would be equivalent in a way)?

But don’t be too afraid as in fact you can’t do anything about it. The only way to avoid it would be to stay at home in the middle of nowhere, closing your windows, stopping electricity and not communicating with anyone.

Your only choice is to trust.

At the end I’m quite sure that the portrait of the google user that could be built from the data stored would tell him more about himself that anyone else and it might also tell him more that he knows about himself.

Scary isn’t it ?