GOOGLE TRACKED 1 September 2006 By Craig Mcqueen YOU probably weren't aware of it, but there's a spy in your living room and workplace. This spy knows a heck of a lot about you, even your most intimate thoughts. Here's an example. In March this year, a Portuguese- American, living in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. "My wife doesn't love anymore," he told his PC. He searched for "Stop your divorce" before turning to "alcohol withdrawal" and "dysfunctional erection". On April 1, he was looking for a local medium who could "predict my future". On April 4, he seems to have conked out on his keyboard, typing in: "llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb". Two weeks later, he was even sadder. "My cheating wife", he typed, and then five times: "I want to kill myself", and then "I want to make my wife suffer. We know all of this because of what he typed into Google. The world's biggest search engine was invented in 1998 by students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It now archives four billion web pages and is reckoned to carry out three-quarters of all internet searches. But what millions of people don't realise as they type in a search is that Big Brother is watching and using Google, and other search engines. You may think that just because no one is looking over your shoulder, you can search for a new job or dating agency in private. You can't. Because every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. When you log on to their search engine, Google assigns what is known as a cookie in the hard drive (memory) of your computer. It doubles as a tagging device and ID card, and records everything you do that's Googlerelated. And it doesn't expire until 2038. You may think Google is just a way of getting information about what's on the internet. But it works both ways. People ask Google things they wouldn't dream of asking friends and families. And Google remembers it all. Worryingly, some of Google's database records came into the public domain, briefly, this year. And that is where we met our Portuguese-American friend. The internet service provider AOL published the details of more than 20 million Google searches made by 650,000 of its customers. The huge database detailing these searches was available on one of AOL's research sites for less than a day before the company realised that substituting numbers for users' names didn't really protect their identities. AOL apologised and removed the database from the internet. But even though the search logs that AOL released were anonymous, it wasn't hard in many cases to discover the user's name from their queries. Let's take the case of user 11110859 of New York who, as became clear through her search records, fell in love but ended up regretting it. The records on the AOL site showed that on March 7 she was buying hip-hop clothes online. Less than three weeks later, she was searching "losing your virginity", followed by three weeks of agonising about whether she was pregnant. By the end of April, the pregnancy scare was over and she was asking: "Why do people hurt others?" And her pain was there, for a few hours, for the world to see. The researcher who published the material has been sacked, as has his manager, and in July AOL's chief technology officer resigned. But those few hours online were enough for the files to be copied all over the internet, and there are now a few websites where anyone can search them using specialised software. So the next time someone tells you Big Brother is out there, you can put them right. He's in the room with you watching what you're searching for on your computer. 'You may think you can search in private. You can't'
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