This is a piece that I wrote for my old blog back in August 2006. With the UK Home Secretary currently seeking to give the UK intelligence agencies access to people's web browsing histories, I thought that it was timely to reprint this as an example of how personal and intimate information about what people search for on the web can be.
When You Gaze Long into an Abyss ...
Legend has it that the Oracle at Delphi exerted considerably influence in the ancient world. For over a millennium no major undertaking - a war, creation of a colony or a leader about to take over the reins of power - was contemplated without first consulting the Oracle.

The tricky thing about the Oracle was that although it was never wrong, its pronouncements were usually cryptic and hard to understand. Many who went away, thinking that they understood the answer that they had received, would, over time, come to realise at their cost that there was at least one other way of interpreting the Oracle's response.
Moving to modern times, we now have Google or another search engine playing a similar role in many people's lives. We use search engines for so many aspects of our lives now that it is difficult to remember how we ever got by without them.
The Monday edition of The Guardian newspaper had a fascinating article entitled "They know all about you" which highlighted the amount of information that Google, and the other search engines, know about each of us. Thanks to the cookies that Google places on our computers, Google is able to uniquely identify each computer that is being used to make a search query. It can combine searches from the same computer, together with the time and date that they were made, to produce a highly personal profile of each individual user.
The extent of this information was revealed when AOL briefly published details of twenty-three million Google searches made by seven hundred thousand of its users over a three month period. Although no user names were published, some of the search queries made it relatively easy to deduce certain of the subscribers' identities. AOL quickly pulled the data from the internet but the damage was done. The incident cost the jobs of the AOL researcher involved in the project, his manager and AOL Chief Technology Officer (and former BNR/Nortel and NYNEX executive) Maureen Govern.
The Guardian article includes a number of examples that show the intimate level of detail included in the data. In one, Florida AOL user 14162375 is shown to be going through a rocky time in his marriage. During March he alternates between search queries based around saving his marriage, including marriage counselling, and wanting to spy on his wife for suspected infidelity. The situation deteriorates and by April his thoughts are moving towards wanting revenge on his wife's new lover and alcoholism.
It's heartbreaking stuff and I'm sure that the gentleman involved had no idea, as he sat at his computer terminal, that Google wasn't treating his queries as coming from an anonymous source. We may think that the flow of information is one way - from Google to us - but in fact it's bi-directional. The price to us for Google's answers is the fact that Google remembers everything we ask it. What it, or other bodies could do with the information it has compiled, is more than a little disturbing.
Back in ancient Greece, the site of the Oracle contained the inscription "Know Thyself". Perhaps it should also be displayed in front of Google's HQ, the Googleplex, but with the addendum "... because we certainly know you!"
William Hern

The tricky thing about the Oracle was that although it was never wrong, its pronouncements were usually cryptic and hard to understand. Many who went away, thinking that they understood the answer that they had received, would, over time, come to realise at their cost that there was at least one other way of interpreting the Oracle's response.
Moving to modern times, we now have Google or another search engine playing a similar role in many people's lives. We use search engines for so many aspects of our lives now that it is difficult to remember how we ever got by without them.
The Monday edition of The Guardian newspaper had a fascinating article entitled "They know all about you" which highlighted the amount of information that Google, and the other search engines, know about each of us. Thanks to the cookies that Google places on our computers, Google is able to uniquely identify each computer that is being used to make a search query. It can combine searches from the same computer, together with the time and date that they were made, to produce a highly personal profile of each individual user.
The extent of this information was revealed when AOL briefly published details of twenty-three million Google searches made by seven hundred thousand of its users over a three month period. Although no user names were published, some of the search queries made it relatively easy to deduce certain of the subscribers' identities. AOL quickly pulled the data from the internet but the damage was done. The incident cost the jobs of the AOL researcher involved in the project, his manager and AOL Chief Technology Officer (and former BNR/Nortel and NYNEX executive) Maureen Govern.
The Guardian article includes a number of examples that show the intimate level of detail included in the data. In one, Florida AOL user 14162375 is shown to be going through a rocky time in his marriage. During March he alternates between search queries based around saving his marriage, including marriage counselling, and wanting to spy on his wife for suspected infidelity. The situation deteriorates and by April his thoughts are moving towards wanting revenge on his wife's new lover and alcoholism.
It's heartbreaking stuff and I'm sure that the gentleman involved had no idea, as he sat at his computer terminal, that Google wasn't treating his queries as coming from an anonymous source. We may think that the flow of information is one way - from Google to us - but in fact it's bi-directional. The price to us for Google's answers is the fact that Google remembers everything we ask it. What it, or other bodies could do with the information it has compiled, is more than a little disturbing.
Back in ancient Greece, the site of the Oracle contained the inscription "Know Thyself". Perhaps it should also be displayed in front of Google's HQ, the Googleplex, but with the addendum "... because we certainly know you!"
William Hern