Paranoia

Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent.

That’s an excerpt from 365tomorrows.com, a site which will publish a new SF short story each day from August 1st 2005 until July 31 2006. (Found via BoingBoing)

What tingled down my spine is the similarity between this short story, and a discussion I initiated some while ago on WebmasterWorld:

Does Google know who I am? I mean on the larger scale, not per individual transaction? […] They set all these cookies in my browser. And even though I use a total of 4 browsers on a total of 2 PC’s with both static and changing IP-adresses, I think it is pretty easy to combine these to ONE user profile. So do they know who I am? And if so, what are they going to do with that knowledge? Will they put me (or my sites) on a watch list to have a closer eye on them? Will red flags appear on some huge wall spanning backprojection screens? Will automated routines zoom in on me as soon as I enter the Matrix? Oh my, that probably sounds pretty paranoid…
But, I mean, they are good at collection data on a large scale, and to process it. What does the distilled data I so freely submit look like? Mostly harmless? Damn, were is my tinfoil hat?