Does Google Know Too Much?

[American Dream]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 46,00.html

Does Google Know Too Much?

By Julia Bonstein, Marcel Rosenbach and Hilmar Schmundt

Google gathers so much detailed information about its users that one critic says some state intelligence bureaus look "like child protection services" in comparison. A few German government bodies have mounted a resistance.


The little town of Molfsee, near Kiel in northern Germany, has three lakes, an idyllic open-air museum and a population just under 5,000. It’s not the likeliest place to declare war against a global power. Yet Molfsee has won the first round of a battle against a powerful digital age opponent.

Germany is skeptical.

The source of friction is a fleet of dark-colored Opel Astras. The cars caused a stir when they started cruising the streets of German cities over the last few months, sporting roof-mounted cameras that record 360-degree images from 11 lenses. Some of the vehicles bear the name of the company that sent them on this massive photographic mission: Google.

"Street View" is the name of the service offered by Google. The California-based Internet company is photographing city streets all over the world, linking the images to digital maps and making the whole package available on the Web. Anyone with an Internet connection will then be able to call up not just a "Google Map" but pictures of the area as well. The company also plans a feature to let users take a virtual stroll through a city.

The camera-wielding Astras haven't come to Molfsee yet, and local Google opponents want to keep it that way. Some of them have resorted to local law. According to a road traffic act passed in the town, Google would need a special permit to drive and photograph in Molfsee. Local politicians have refused to issue the permit.

That decision has had a ripple effect throughout Germany. The state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein, where Molfsee is located, discussed Google's project in early October. There's even been talk of introducing legislation at the national level. Schleswig-Holstein's top data protection organization offers a downloadable sign on its web site, to be printed and placed on citizens' front lawns: "No pictures for Google Street View."

Google in the Real World

The outrage spreading from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein down to the rest of the country is something new and potentially damaging for Google. So far the company, founded by computer-scientist entrepreneurs Sergey Brin and Larry Page, has maintained a mostly clean reputation. The brand calls up an image of well-engineered Web applications provided -- for free -- by two nice young men in Mountain View, California.

But with Street View the corporation is appearing in the real world for the first time, and not everyone is pleased. “These pictures, which are available for retrieval worldwide over the Internet, could easily be linked to satellite photos, address databanks and other personal data,” warns Peter Schaar, Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection.

With just one click, Schaar suggests, it would be easy to check out the condition of, say, a residential building. Banks could use the information to raise a mortgage rate. Burglars could use the images to case a home.

Google's Internet empire has become a political issue here. And only a fraction of the company's data comes from the car-mounted cameras. There’s also the popular Gmail service ("Google Mail" in Germany), the YouTube video portal, a social network called Orkut, and the Google Desktop program, which allows users to search their own computers.

The company has also introduced its own browser, called Chrome. And it's entered the world of mobile communication with a new cell phone operating system called Android. The first Android-compatible phones all but sold out before the official market launch in the US last week, with 1.5 million advance orders.

With its services, Google has established itself as a global online power in just a decade. Through massive acquisition of Internet services -- like YouTube -- it has built itself into a data-collection empire. One click by a user lets Google take search data, along with a date and time, as well as specific details like IP addresses, the type of browser used, language settings and even log-in user names

It’s also well-known that Google checks for keywords in the content of e-mails sent through its mail program, then displays relevant advertisements in a sidebar. This clever exploitation of information for direct advertising has turned Google into a multi-billion-dollar organization. The company brought in over $16 billion in revenue last year.

This is what makes the debate in Germany such bad news for the corporation. Denying Google data cuts to the heart of its business model. More and more customers are wondering: What does Google know about me?

Well, compared to what Google knows about us, many intelligence agencies look "like child protection services," says Hendrik Speck, professor at the applied sciences university in Kaiserslautern, a southwestern German city. Theoretically, he says, Google could record a query for pregnancy tests, then nine months later provide advertisements for diapers. Or -- six years later -- it could show offers for after-school homework help.

"The more data Google collects from its users, the higher the price it can ask for advertisements," says Speck.

A 'Data Monster' Image

The man whose job it is to allay such concerns operates from a classy address in the heart of Paris, the Avenue de l'Opéra. Nothing at the building's entrance indicates a connection to Google. The world's most effective data collector depends on discretion. Peter Fleischer is a wiry forty-something in a T-shirt, also known as Google's "Global Privacy Counsel."

Fleischer likes to talk about balance -- finding a reasonable compromise between the breakneck pace of Internet development and the inertia of the legal system. In the case of "Street View" images, the current compromise involves image recognition software, which automatically searches for license plates and faces in order to blur them out. People who find themselves in the pictures can also complain, and the images will be removed.

Offering information, and taking it.

That solution sounds clean, but the reality is messy. A horse pulling a carriage in New York City may be recognized as a face, blurred out, while an Australian man photographed lying drunk by the side of the road remains vivid and visible to the world. He complains, but it’s too late: copies of his picture have already circulated on malicious Web sites.

As the company’s head of data protection, Fleischer is in charge of protecting hundreds of millions of users' data -- 29 million in Germany alone. It’s also his job to assuage the growing unease on the part of many users and politicians about the Google "data monster."

The Molfsee citizens' concerns are just as unfounded, Fleischer says, and for the same reason: "We collect a lot of data, but nothing that identifies any particular person," he insists.

For Gerald Reischl, author of a book in German called "The Google Trap," such assurances aren't enough. The corporation's "machinations, hunger for power and dominance need to be scrutinized," says Reischl. Even those few Internet users who don’t regularly access Google sites end up with their data accessible to the company anyway, thanks to a program called "Google Analytics."

Google Analytics is a free program for web site owners to keep track of usage patterns on their site. The data is also saved by Google. Some sites don’t even mention this to their users. "Analytics is Google's most dangerous opportunity to spy," says Reischl. According to some estimates the software is integrated into 80 percent of frequently visited German-language Internet sites.

SPIEGEL ONLINE no longer uses Google Analytics. "We want to ensure that data on our users’ browsing patterns don't leave our site," says Wolfgang Büchner, one of SPIEGEL ONLINE's two chief editors.

But what happens to the client information sent over to the United States? How is it organized? How long is it stored? Who's allowed to see the data -- and how can it be deleted?

According to Fleischer, such concerns are unwarranted. "We don't know our users," he says, "nor do we want to." He says Internet logs aren't related to individuals, and stored IP addresses are nothing but numbers that connect computers to each other. Under no circumstances, says Fleischer, would data from a conventional Internet search be combined with the personal information saved through a service that requires a login, such as Gmail.

Thilo Weichert, head of Schleswig-Holstein’s Independent State Agency for Data Protection, based in Kiel, can relate experiences to the contrary. His experts test each new offer from Google and regularly diagnose aspects that conflict with Germany’s data protection laws.

Google’s German headquarters tends to react negatively to Weichert’s name. He doesn’t give them an easy time: The data protection specialist from northern Germany has already issued a public warning on the Analytics program. "Most users of the product aren't entirely aware that by operating Google Analytics they're utilizing a service that transfers data to the United States, to be broadly used and exploited," he has written. "This violates the data privacy laws protecting those who use the Web sites." Google reacted with a letter to the governor of Schleswig-Holstein, warning of economic losses and demanding that Weichert be called off his attack.

Such reactions only incite Weichert. "The company operates in an unacceptably non-transparent manner," he says. "Their users are basically standing naked in front of them, and Google itself discloses only what is absolutely necessary about its data handling strategy, and then only under pressure."


The company does tend to take action only when directly criticized. Its original policy for storing IP addresses connected to online queries was open-ended. After massive criticism, Google agreed to make the data anonymous after 18 months, then finally changed the period to nine months. The process has been similar with the Chrome browser and with Street View. Weichert wants to address these issues when Germany’s data protection officials meet in Düsseldorf in November. He will argue for making Schleswig-Holstein's critical stance against Street View a national policy.

Meanwhile, a top data protection specialist at Google named Peter Fleischer likes to talk about what’s to come. “Google Health” is a databank where patients can store their medical records and retrieve them over the Internet. This service could radically change the nature of the health system -- and it could change Google itself as well. When the topic turns to health, most users are likely to sit up and take notice. They start asking what happens with their data.

Google Health has been offered so far only in a test version, but it’s brought about something new. The company has established a committee of independent experts to oversee the security of patient data. Now critics say it’s time for a similar body to oversee the corporation as a whole.

"We're thinking about it," Fleischer says. But he adds that privacy protection has to be weighed against the security interests of the user. He concludes with his favorite line: "We have to find a reasonable balance."

[Allegro]

.
The War on Web Anonymity | Spiegel Online International
By Marcel Rosenbach and Hilmar Schmundt
August 5, 2011

The Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris is a respectable address, surrounded by banks, boutiques and cafés. The tenants listed on door plaques include a language school and an airline. But the name of the building's most famous tenant is not listed: Google. The global corporation values privacy -- its own privacy, at least.


"We take data protection seriously," says Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel. "We don't know our users by name," he insists. "We just store anonymous identifiers, but no personal data." This is an important distinction for Fleischer, who says that Google's primary goal is to improve the accuracy of targeted advertising. According to Fleischer, the identities of the people behind the numbers are irrelevant. "We don't even want to know the names of users," he says.

These statements were made only three years ago, and yet they seem to be from a different era. In the past, the Internet was a sea of anonymity dotted with username islands, but now the relationship is being reversed. Anonymity is being declared the exception -- and a problem.

In June, Google launched a frontal attack on competitor Facebook and began testing its own social network: Google+. Suddenly Google is asking for precisely what Fleischer so vehemently declared was of no interest to the company in 2008 -- real names.

The company has repeatedly blocked the accounts of users who refuse to provide their real names instead of a pseudonym, because this is a violation of its "community standards." Those rules stipulate the following: "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you."

Free Speech vs. Attribution

Today Google is no longer satisfied with pseudonyms, and it isn't alone. Politicians and law enforcement agencies have also declared war on anonymity, a fundamental characteristic of the Internet.

For some, anonymity is among one of the biggest strengths of the Internet, a guarantee of free speech and privacy. Others voice concerns over the "attribution problem" and see it as a key issue in the digital world that must be eliminated.

Particularly in the wake of attacks in Oslo and on Utøya Island , there is growing interest in tearing the masks off the faces of those who author radical right-wing hate blogs . Critics are calling for stronger online surveillance, an alarm button for reporting dangerous content and the reintroduction of data retention. But what use are surveillance and warning mechanisms if the authors of violent messages cannot ultimately be identified?

Last week the anti-Islamic treatises by the blogger "Fjordman," whom the Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik has described as his "favorite writer," made international headlines. But of course he isn't the only one hiding behind a pseudonym. Jihadist forums using crude code names seek to incite hatred and violence against "infidels," while right-wing extremists use the protection of anonymity to publish the names and addresses of members of the Antifa, or anti-fascist movement, who employ the same tactic.

Feelings of public outrage run high when it comes to issues like cyber-bullying, hate mail and insults, as was recently the case with iShareGossip, a German site where students could anonymously insult their fellow students. Some time ago, a site called Rotten Neighbor triggered similar feelings of outrage. It enabled people to take their neighborhood disputes online. Of course, those who unloaded their vicious remarks on the site remained anonymous, while the victims of their abusive language were clearly identified.

Limiting Anonymity

Last autumn Axel Fischer, a member of Germany's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the chairman of the parliamentary commission on "Internet and Digital Society," called for a "ban on disguises" in the virtual world, at least for forums with political voting options, as he clarified after a storm of protest from the online community. Then Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) also addressed the issue several times, saying that "limitless anonymity" should not exist on the Internet, where the authorities must be able to identity people who break the law.

De Maizière also launched two projects intended to facilitate secure identification on the Internet -- albeit on a voluntary basis at first -- the supposedly tamper-proof digital mail system "De-Mail" and the new identity card.

But in the anarchic world of the Internet is it even possible to implement a large-scale, binding identification requirement? A look at events in South Korea offers some answers to this question.

Ironically, this journey has led to more surveillance in the Asian country, where the Internet euphoria is among the most rampant in the world. In 2008, the 39-year-old Korean actress Choi Jin-sil was bombarded with hateful tirades online. No longer able to bear the attacks, she hung herself.

The nation was shocked. The conservative government reacted with the broader application of a law originally created only for election campaigns. Under the "Real Name Verification Law" anyone who wishes to post comments or videos online must identify themselves with their "resident registration number," a 13-digit unique identifier issued by the government.

A Civilizing Effect

Currently the law applies only to websites with more than 100,000 users per day. Some website operators are probably quite pleased with the regulation, because the real names of customers are extremely valuable in the advertising industry.

Media researcher Daegon Cho of the US-based Carnegie Mellon University wanted to know what lessons could be learned from the Korean experiment. Does the constraint of having to reveal one's true identity online have a moderating effect on the Internet community?

It does, as Cho discovered. The Identification Law has a civilizing effect on the Internet's verbal offenders -- though only in moderation. Those who rarely post comments online were especially likely to temper their emotions. In this group, the number of comments containing "swear words and anti-normative expressions" fell from 27 to 20 percent. Nevertheless, the majority of troublemakers continued to swear without restraint under their real names. Besides, instructions for circumventing identification requirements have been available online for some time, and when in doubt, troublemakers can always use foreign servers.

Instead of an identification requirement, the online community is placing its faith in the self-regulating forces of the Internet. Twenty years of experience with the World Wide Web have shown that it does not necessarily lead to moral decline. In fact, the figures from South Korea suggest that the Internet even civilizes some users with time. Experienced contributors to forums write offensive comments about six times less frequently than those who rarely write comments.

The discussion culture is often tended with sophisticated filter mechanisms and evaluation systems, and many administrators act as blog monitors, taking action against rude comments. Reputation systems reward popular discussion participants, whether or not they are anonymous. The content is what counts.

But what about extremists and criminals who use anonymity to evade law enforcement?

No Match For Law Enforcement

It appears that if there is sufficient pressure from investigators, the much-touted principle of anonymity quickly evaporates. The arrests of many presumed members of the hacker groups "Anonymous," "LulzSec" and Germany's "No-Name Crew" prove this.

The "unmasking" of about 20 "Anonymous" activists speaks volumes. Apparently neither masks nor virtual precautions could protect the net anarchists from being apprehended. Ironically, both the real names and, in some cases, the photos of these previously faceless net activists are now publicly available.

In a chat with SPIEGEL, German hacker "Darkhammer," accused of having hacked into and disclosed customs data, boasted that he wasn't afraid of the authorities, and that only stupid people let themselves be caught. He was arrested a few days later.

There is also ample evidence to suggest that political pressure isn't necessary to force the use of real names online because users will take that step on their own. Nothing has accelerated the trend more than the success of social networking sites like Facebook, where users voluntarily reveal not only their names, but often photos, birthdays and sometimes even intimate details of their lives.

These services have turned into something resembling a digital civil registration office -- the antithesis of anonymity. This is slowly undermining a quality that also has many proven advantages, particularly for dissidents in countries with oppressive regimes. A report by the respected American Association for the Advancement of Science even concludes: "Anonymous communication should be regarded as a strong human right."

The example of media education shows what a double-edged sword the call for identification on the Internet can be, though. In one respect, Germany's Ministry of Consumer Protection, parents and data privacy advocates are in rare agreement. To protect themselves against fraud, stalking and abuse, young people should never use their real names online, they say.

It isn't easy to explain why this valuable anonymity suddenly becomes a problem after their 18th birthday.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

[Joe Hillshoist]

Does Google Know Too Much?

Yes. Kill it quickly.

With fire.

[Seamus OBlimey]

Too much information?

No such thing.

[Mikey]

The information they have is only as good as the information you give them...my facebook page has advertisements for the holiday im planning to Turkey this year as well as all the grungey bands i like, my interests are kayaking, surfing, and mountaineering. Ive never been married but have eight illegitimate children.

Thats apart from the fact i holiday somewhere else and dont intend to go to Turkey ever, i have some kids with with my wife, i dont like kayaking, never been surfing and listen to 60's psychadelia.

I just spend ten minutes of my day entering wild and wacky search terms into Google, it keeps me amused.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Seems like a fairly fundamental category error to be talking about Google as a "They" -- especially when the conversation gets so much more interesting when you start talking about Google as an "it," because after all, that's really the central vision of the founders.

Here's another formulation: "Does Google Know How Much It Knows Yet?"

On a more human level, though, here's a fascinating Top Secret America crossover: "Who Are Google's Super Users?" Who actually has the access to their top-level interfaces for the Ocean of Petabytes?

[Stephen Morgan]

fire is insufficiently destructive against HDD platters.

[12#4]

Giving both an example answer and worrying implications of WR's question, for extra brownie points It was a little difficult, but I did google it.

No idea what happened to the perp in terms of charges, though that should be Googleable as well, if Google allows..

On a more human level, though, here's a fascinating Top Secret America crossover: "Who Are Google's Super Users?" Who actually has the access to their top-level interfaces for the Ocean of Petabytes?

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/soa_webservices/227400442

Google Fires Engineer For Spying On Users
Staffer accused of accessing four minors' private Gmail and GTalk accounts.

By Mathew J. Schwartz InformationWeek
September 15, 2010 10:35 AM
Google on Tuesday said that it had fired an engineer for breaking the company's internal privacy policies.

The company's statement did not contradict a report published earlier that day by Gawker that David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former engineer at Google and part of an elite technical group at Google , had been dismissed for using his position "to access users' accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment."

In the statement, Bill Coughran, senior VP of engineering for Google, confirmed Barksdale's dismissal "for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies."

Gawker reported that Barksdale used his access credentials to spy on people's private Gmail and GTalk accounts, as well as contact lists and transcripts of chats, and that the victims of his spying included four minors. Furthermore, while his actions reportedly did not extend to sexual harassment, there was at least one incident involving taunting.

According to Gawker, "in an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend , according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her."

According to Techcrunch, a Google spokesperson on Tuesday also disclosed that a similar incident involving a privacy breach by a Google insider had occurred once before, but that it didn't involve a minor. The employee involved was dismissed.

In the wake of this privacy breach, Google's Coughran said that the company will be increasing its access control monitoring. "We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls -- for example, we are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective," he said. "That said, a limited number of people will always need to access these systems if we are to operate them properly -- which is why we take any breach so seriously."

When it comes to insiders abusing their access privileges, Google is far from alone. Earlier this year, for example, the government charged Bradley Manning with releasing to Wikileaks.org a video of a U.S. helicopter strike in Iraq that killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children.

As a result, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently launched a new program aimed at stopping insiders from abusing their access to sensitive Department of Defense computer networks.

[Gnomad]

fire is insufficiently destructive against HDD platters.

Nuke it from orbit.

Btw, one browser extension that blocks a lot of tracking is Ghostery - http://www.ghostery.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/ghostery/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... cbmpeaniij

It also tells you what tracking sites it has blocked at a given website visit, and is configurable to allow/block what you need.

"Be a web detective.

Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior.

Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.

Build an information foundation.

Each of the over 500 companies has a profile that will help you learn more about their technology, their business, and their privacy policies.

At Ghostery, we believe in enabling informed decisions about your control over your online privacy. The more you learn about the companies trading your online behavioral data, the better you can make decisions about how to control your exposure to those companies.

Ghostery allows zero-tolerance blocking of anything ad related, complete (visible) open communication with ad companies, or countless measures in between - determined by you, the informed web user."

And a service from Moxie Marlinspike, a hacker, that pools together the users searches via proxies, so they all seem like one Google user when doing searches (of course consider if you want your searches to go through their proxy, in current iterations at least the search strings are passed encrypted over SSL):
http://www.googlesharing.net/

"Where GoogleSharing Comes In

GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things:

Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don't require a login.
Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow.
Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected.
The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.

This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.

The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.

GoogleSharing Privacy

With all of your Google traffic being redirected to GoogleSharing for anonymization, there is the risk that we could become the ones who monitor, record, and track users. While our privacy policy is that we do not record, monitor, or log any user traffic, and while all of the source code for the GoogleSharing addon and proxy are open source, it is no longer necessary to trust that we (or any other GoogleSharing proxy operator) is behaving appropriately.

With Google's introduction of SSL support for search requests (encrypted.google.com), the GoogleSharing system now allows clients to checkout GoogleSharing identities and route encrypted traffic through GoogleSharing to Google. So while client requests are anonymized by GoogleSharing, the actual traffic that the GoogleSharing proxy sees is encrypted to Google, and hence can not be monitored."

And of course everyone should have NoScript for Firefox and NotScript for Chrome, as well as AdBlock, and possibly Flashblock too, so you can block all nonessential executable code from running on webpages you visit:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... lashblock/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... bcaignabnl (FlashBlock for Chrome)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... /noscript/
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/de ... dajjpkkcfn (NotScript for Chrome)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... lock-plus/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... kkbiglidom (...for Chrome)

[Stephen Morgan]

If worried about Google spying upon self, think twice about using Chrome, methinks.

[Gnomad]

If worried about Google spying upon self, think twice about using Chrome, methinks.

Probably yeah.

One thing Chrome does (I think it can be turned off, but by default) is that it autocompletes / suggests addresses and search terms based on what you are typing in the address bar, even before you hit enter. This means all the partial and whole terms are sent, even if you never hit the enter.
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bi ... swer=95656

I'm mostly using the above mentioned extensions to keep pages loading faster, also on slow computers, even with all the unnecessary ads, flash trinkets, et cetera, than because of Google. They do help to decrease the amount of advertising tracking you are exposed to, esp. Ghostery.

http://theweek.com/article/index/201526 ... ing-on-you
(after Microsoft claimed Google spies on us all, pot calling kettle black and what not )

[Joe Hillshoist]

fire is insufficiently destructive against HDD platters.

Nuke it from orbit.

Kill it with holy fire.

[Joe Hillshoist]

"Does Google Know How Much It Knows Yet?"

It, well something, has been sentient be it google or possibly the entire "internet" (every connected device) for a while now. What that means tho, thats a really intresting question I reckon. (Don't ask me why I think that either, or what "sentience" is cos I won't be able to give you a satisfactory answer.)

On a more human level, though, here's a fascinating Top Secret America crossover: "Who Are Google's Super Users?" Who actually has the access to their top-level interfaces for the Ocean of Petabytes?

Thats a good question. (Also - does anyone have access to "all" of it? Serious question btw)

[Joe Hillshoist]

I think I forgot the original AIEEEE in front of "kill it with fire".

[Stephen Morgan]

"Does Google Know How Much It Knows Yet?"

It, well something, has been sentient be it google or possibly the entire "internet" (every connected device) for a while now. What that means tho, thats a really intresting question I reckon. (Don't ask me why I think that either, or what "sentience" is cos I won't be able to give you a satisfactory answer.)

Sapient machines are cool. Just got to stop them trying to take over the world.

On a more human level, though, here's a fascinating Top Secret America crossover: "Who Are Google's Super Users?" Who actually has the access to their top-level interfaces for the Ocean of Petabytes?

Thats a good question. (Also - does anyone have access to "all" of it? Serious question btw)

"root"