You are what you search (or so it appears)
Two months ago my CEO pitched our company to a VC in a Palo Alto coffee shop. As he normally does, he did the demo on his laptop. The VC wanted to compare our product LeapTag (that link is also disclosure), against Google Personalized Search and logged into my CEO's computer to do it.
No one noticed that he never logged out.
Two months later my CEO gets an email from the guy, with a list of searches attached. "Are these your searches?" he asked. In fact they were. Search queries for the past two months - including some from just a few minutes before the guy sent the email. Needless to say, my CEO was horrified and wrote about the experience here.
Yesterday I was talking to him about his intended blog post and I opened up my own personal search history as part of the conversation. I'm not into online porn, or anything else I'd be embarrassed about him seeing, so I felt very comfortable doing this. Ten additional seconds of forethought might have changed that.
What was the first thing at the top of the list? "Threesomes."
Yikes. That was for a tongue-in-cheek post I wrote a while back. Next were a bunch of musicals, Oklahoma, Godspell, The Fantasticks, etc. Then some car stuff, the names of parts BMW said were broken and a search for the price of a new M5 (a girl can dream, right?). Where was all the work stuff?
I'm sure my work searches were there, I was just temporarily blinded by my own sense of embarrassment. Now my boss thinks I'm a musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome. Great. I start to mumble something about how most of these searches are for blog posts and decide that giving away more information is not actually going to help. So I stopped talking.
It's actually amazing how much your personal search history reveals about yourself. And it's all out of context, building a profile of you (esp. if you used Personalized Search) that you may never see. We think it's private, that as long as we periodically clear the toolbar history the information will be gone.
But it won't.
I think that would make an interesting QOTD: Post your personal search history. Would anybody do it without heavily editing it first? Perhaps. We spend so much time on meme quizzes to provide insight on Who We Are (what Tarot card are you?), posting your history would seems like an interesting next step. Would you do it?
I think we've discovered that this musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome would not.
Comments
I think we're heading closer to the portrayed in Minority Report, where advertising is much more focussed on the individual using data gathered by our web habits, spending habits, and all our other habits that are all documented and stored by governments and ad agencies. The question is this: what can we do about it? Probably not a great deal really. Being a dad of two young children, I find myself wondering what the world will be like for them when they're my age. But rather than thinking about with fear, I think about it with fascination and excitement. So I'll just keep on letting Google work on its profile of me and not let it worry me
I like your site and your posts. You always give us voxers something to think about.