Paranoid searcher

Yesterday, as I was nonchalantly browsing through the Internet looking for ethical dilemmas to write about, I stumbled on myself. I literally did. There was a website, www.veromi.net that gave me indigestion. The website had me, it had all my addresses and my “potential roommates,” which included my parents and my husband. The website had all my places of employment.

I began to think that Internet does give us access to the world of information, but the trade off is ourselves. I use google.com about two hundred or more times a day. I look for everything from doctors ratings to jobs online. However, recently I found out that Google has the worst privacy practice out of top online destinations. A report came out in 2007 by London-based Privacy International, which assigned Google the lowest grade in privacy. The group described Google in the following terms, as the company “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility in privacy.”

The other companies that were surveyed, including Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL did not reach the same “height” as Google to “achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy.”

Google responded by saying that they aggressively protect the privacy of their users. But do they really?

Maybe in our new Brave World my searches will be sold along wit my address and “roommates.”