Google Costs You

[madmusic]

Googling Security (book review)

The book opens with the observation that Google's business model is built on the prospect of providing its services for free. From the individual user's perspective, this is a model that they can live with. But the inherent risk is that the services really are not completely free; they come at the cost of the loss of control of one's personal information that they share with Google.

The book lists over 50 Google services and applications which collect personal information. From mail, alerts, blogging, news, desktop, images, maps, groups, video and more. People are placing a great deal of trust into Google as each time they use a Google service, they are trusting the organization to safeguard their personal information. In chapter 5, the book lists over 20 stated uses and advantages of Google Groups, and the possible information disclosure risks of each.

In the books 10 chapters, the author provides a systematic overview of how Google gets your personal data and what it does with it. In chapter 3, the book details how disparate pieces of data can be aggregated and mined to create extremely detailed user profiles. These profiles are invaluable to advertisers who will pay Google dearly for such meticulous user data. This level of personal data aggregation was impossible to obtain just a few years ago, given the lack of computing power, combined with the single point of user data. The book notes that this level of personalization, while golden to advertisers, is a privacy anathema.

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/12/0520243&from=rss

[BlooInBloo]

1. It's always a risk to give out personal info, no doubt about it.

[Sherman A1]

2. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Everything comes with a cost. The question is always are we willing to pay that cost for the service.

[ConsAreLiars]

3. Use Scroogle

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle )

"Scroogle is a web service that disguises the Internet address of users who want to run Google searches anonymously.<4> Scroogle also gives users the option of having all communication between their computer and the search page be SSL encrypted.<5>

"The tool was created by Google critic Daniel Brandt,<2><3> who was concerned about Google collecting information on users, and set up Scroogle to filter searches through his servers before going to Google. "I don't save the search terms and I delete all my logs every week. So even if the feds come around and ask me questions I don't know the answer because I don't have the logs any more," he said "I don't associate the search terms with the user's address at all, so I can't even match those up."<6>"