Geeks for Christ

Google may know more about you than your mother does. Got a problem with that?

Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently made that statement to this reporter. A few years ago, it might have sounded far-fetched. But if you’re one of the growing number of people who are using more and more products in Google’s ever-expanding stable (at last count, I was using a dozen), you might wonder if Bankston isn’t onto something.

It’s easy to understand why privacy advocates and policymakers are sounding alarms about online privacy in general — and singling out Google in particular. If you use Google’s search engine, Google knows what you searched for as well as your activity on partner Web sites that use its ad services. If you use the Chrome browser, it may know every Web site you’ve typed into the address bar, or “Omnibox.”

It may have all of your e-mail (Gmail), your appointments (Google Calendar) and even your last known location (Google Latitude). It may know what you’re watching (YouTube) and whom you are calling. It may have transcripts of your telephone messages (Google Voice).

It may hold your photos in Picasa Web Albums, which includes face-recognition technology that can automatically identify you and your friends in new photos. And through Google Books, it may know what books you’ve read, what you annotated and how long you spent reading.

Technically, of course, Google doesn’t know anything about you. But it stores tremendous amounts of data about you and your activities on its servers, from the content you create to the searches you perform, the Web sites you visit and the ads you click.

Google, says Bankston, “is expecting consumers to trust it with the closest thing to a printout of their brain that has ever existed.”

How Google uses personal information is guided by three “bedrock principles,” says Peter Fleischer, the company’s global privacy counsel. “We don’t sell it. We don’t collect it without permission. We don’t use it to serve ads without permission.” But what constitutes “personal information” has not been universally agreed upon.

[Google] is expecting consumers to trust it with the closest thing to a printout of their brain that has ever existed.

Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney, EFF

Google isn’t the only company to follow this business model. “Online tools really aren’t free. We pay for them with micropayments of personal information,” says Greg Conti, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and author of the book Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You? But Google may have the biggest collection of data about individuals, the content they create and what they do online.

It is the breathtaking scope of data under Google’s control, generated by an expanding list of products and services, that has put the company at the center of the online privacy debate. According to Pam Dixon, executive director at the World Privacy Forum, “No company has ever had this much consumer data” — an assertion that Google disputes.

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There are limos and there are limos and then there is the presidential limo (I should make that Presidential). This is the one that will carry the new president and, believe me, it is not like other limos.

Known in the Secret Service as “The Beast,” the customized Cadillac limousine is thought to be built on General Motors’ hefty 2500-series truck chassis. The Secret Service, of course, does not give you a spec sheet or much other information on The Beast, other than to say a new one is being put in service for Barack Obama.

There are some glimmers of information, however, in a New York Times piece by Gregg D. Merksamer, who says he has spent 30 years studying and writing about presidential cars, part of a class called “professional cars,” which also includes hearses and ambulances. Suffice to say that the limo is essentially a gussied-up and lavishly comfortable armored personnel carrier with, it is rumored, five-inch-thick windows and armor plating throughout.

Here’s the top 10 fastest-rising searches entered into Google by Internet users around the globe:

1. sarah palin

2. beijing 2008

3. facebook login

4. tuenti

5. heath ledger

6. obama

7. nasza klasa

8. wer kennt wen

9. euro 2008

10. jonas brothers

It seems the world could not get enough of Sarah Palin.

The Alaska governor and former vice presidential candidate made headlines with her gun-toting, snowmachining, “you betcha” style. Palin even dominated tech headlines in October when a University of Tennessee student hacked into her Yahoo! Mail account.

Here in the U.S., however, president-elect Barack Obama topped the fastest-rising search terms list, while Palin came in at #7.

But tech was the real Google champ with requests for Facebook, iPhone, ATT and YouTube all making the top 10.

Google.com’s Fastest-Rising (U.S.)

1. obama

2. facebook

3. att

4. iphone

5. youtube

6. fox news

7. palin

8. beijing 2008

9. david cook

10. surf the channel

When gas prices started getting out of control this summer, Americans showed their frustration through their queries for hybrid cars. Other green searches included solar panels and compact fluorescent bulbs.

The economy was also at the top of people’s concerns. Searches for economic terms spiked in the U.S. while the Dow plummeted and financial firms started collapsing.

1. financial crisis

2. depression

3. bailout

4. mortgage crisis

5. wall street

6. oil

7. stock market

8. subprime

9. credit crisis

10. housing crisis

Social networks were also big in 2008. Facebook surpassed MySpace as the number one destination, and International social networks also came to the fore. More than half of the top queried social networks were for sites outside the U.S.

Social Networks Sought

1. facebook

2. myspace

3. hi5

4. orkut

5. linkedin

6. nasza klasa

7. netlog

8. mixi

9. meetup

10. odnoklassniki