The spy in your computer

The spy in your computer

Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public? That nightmare has just become a reality for thousands of customers, writes Andrew Brown.

IN MARCH, a Florida man with a passion for Portuguese football 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 animore," he told the machine. He searched for "Stop your divorce" and "I want revenge to my wife" before turning to self-examination with "alchool withdrawl", "alchool withdrawl sintoms" and "disfunctional erection". On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could "predict my futur".But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed when AOL published the details of 23 million searches made by 650,000 of its customers over three months this year. The searches were carried out by Google, from which AOL buys in its search functions.

The gigantic database detailing these customers' search inquiries was available on an AOL research site for a few hours before the company realised that substituting numbers for users' names did not really protect their identities. The company apologised for its mistake - and removed the database from the internet. The researcher who published the material has been sacked, as has his manager, and last week AOL's chief technology officer, Maureen Govern, resigned.

But those few hours online were enough for the raw data files to be copied all over the internet, and there are now four or five sites where anyone can search through them using specialised software.

As users, we think the Google search engine is a way of supplying us with information about what's on the web. But the flow of information is two-way. We ask Google things that we would hesitate to ask anyone living. The price for the answers is that Google remembers it all.

Take user 11110859 of New York, who fell in love and then was sorry. She was up early on March 7 to buy hip-hop clothes; by March 26, however, there was more excitement in her life. Searches on "losing your virginity" were followed by three weeks of frantic worry about whether she was pregnant. Stuff she might have hesitated to tell her best friend or her mother is all quite clear from the Google searches. But by the end of April the pregnancy scare was over and had been replaced by a broken heart. Even before she had stopped asking "Can you still be pregnant even though your period came?" she was asking "Why do people hurt others" and this was the theme of almost all her questions throughout May.

What was published by AOL represents only a fraction of the accumulated knowledge warehoused within Google's records - but it has given everyone, as users, a dramatic and unsettling glimpse of how much, and in what intimate detail, the big search engines know about us.

The number of searches Google carries out is a secret, but comScore, an independent firm, reckons that the search engine performed 2.7 billion searches by American users in July. Yahoo, its main rival, conducted about 1.8 billion American searches in the same month; Microsoft's MSN about 800 million and AOL 366 million.

All of this information is stored. Google identifies every computer that connects to it with an implant (known as a cookie), which will not expire until 2038. If you also use Gmail, Google knows your email address - and, of course, keeps all your email searchable. If you sign up to have Google ads on a website, then the company knows your bank account details and home address, as well as all your searches. If you have a blog on the free blogger service, Google owns that. The company also knows, of course, the routes you have looked up on Google maps. Yahoo operates a similar range of services.

All this knowledge has been handed over quite freely by us as users. It is the foundation of Google's fortune because it allows the company to target very precisely the advertising it sends in our direction. Other companies have equally ambitious plans. An application lodged on August 10 with the US Patent and Trademark Office showed that Amazon hopes to patent ways of interrogating a database that would record not just what its 59 million customers have bought - which it already knows - or what they would like to buy (which, with their wish lists, they tell the world) but their income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. The company, of course, already knows who we are and where we live.

Even though the search logs that AOL released were made anonymous by assigning a number to each user, it is not difficult in many cases to discover somebody's name from their search queries. And it is easy to follow what users were thinking as they sat at their computers, in the apparent privacy of their own homes, since the time and date of every search is given.

On April 4, for instance, user 14162375, the melancholy Portuguese-American in Florida, seems to have passed out on the keyboard at 6.20pm, when he asked suddenly: "llllfkkgjnnvjjfokrb" then "vvvvbmkmjk" and "vvglhkitopppfoppr".

An hour later he had recovered enough to search for variations on his wife's name - he thought she might have moved to New England. On the evening of April 16, matters came to a head: "My cheating wife", he typed, and then, five times, "I want to kill myself", and then "I want to make my wife suffer", followed quickly by "Kill my wifes mistress", "My wifes ass", "A cheating wife". Two days after that he was back looking for audio surveillance and bugging equipment and four weeks later he seemed to have cheered up and was looking for motorcycle insurance.

The story stops abruptly there, at the end of May, because that is when the three months' worth of released AOL search records ended.

These stories, with all the revealing information they contain, cannot always easily be tied to a specific individual, but sometimes they can. The social security number, with which all Americans are issued, conforms to a recognisable pattern that is easy to search for in the data that AOL released. So, too, are phone numbers.

At least one person in the AOL group, a blameless grandmother in Alabama, was identified by The New York Times within days of the AOL data release. And though it may be hard to identify complete strangers, it is much easier to recognise in the AOL data details of someone you may know. A church woman in the Midwest, whose quest for Christian quilted wall-hangings was interspersed with inquiries about vibrators and arousing frigid wives, is probably easy for anyone in her congregation to identify.

This is knowledge beyond the dreams of any secret police in history. This year Google fought a lawsuit to keep a week's worth of random search data out of the hands of the US Government, but other search companies have handed over their data without complaint and nobody has yet discovered what deals have been struck between search engines and the Chinese Government. China is generally thought of as trying to censor the internet, which it does; search engines that do business in China must censor their own results if they are to succeed. But the real power for a totalitarian regime is no longer just censorship. It is to allow its citizens to search for anything they want - and then remember it.

No Western government, so far as anyone knows, has gone that far. But if one does it will know where the information is kept that will tell it almost everything about almost everyone.

The Guardian

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