JDPFu.com 2025

Acxiom is where all your purchasing habits are stored. What magazines, catalogs, newspapers, and which stores you like among other things. I digress.

Google provides free services for all sorts of things, but their overall account agreement is used across all those services. It basically says, they will scan your content and sites you hit and build a profile about YOU for the purpose of targeted ad delivery and other purposes. Fine. They told you, but you didn’t read it and haven’t thought thru what it really means.

Use GMail? Google parses every email and tags the content with your ID. Oh, you upload all your friends’ email addresses and perhaps phone numbers too, right? They save that with your gmail ID for later. All your friends do this too.

Use Google search? Tagged – every page you select from google. Now they have searches and your email. Ever searched on a disease name, your phone number, your name, your family name? Hummm. Google knows it and they don’t forget.

Go to any web site with JavaScript enabled? Ever noticed the number of web sites that use Google-Analytics? This service isn’t for you, but for the web site owner. The array of statistics that google provides to the webmaster is unbelievable. It is an excellent service. Heck, I could be using it too. Now google has email, searches and web content for nearly every page you visit even when those pages are SSL secured. Hummm.

Use GoogleDocs? All that content is indexed. You login to googledocs with your gmail account, don’t you? Hummm.

Use Google Calendar? Correlate that with gmail addresses, google searches, googledocs, hummm.

Use GrandCentral? Uploaded all your contacts (with their email addresses)? Correlate that with gmail addresses, google searches, googledocs, hummm.

Use GoogleMaps? Those directions are usually fantastic, right? Google knows where you live – you did set your default starting point and you login with your gmail account. Correlated.

Use Google News? Correlated.
Use Google Newsgroups? Correlated.
Use Google Finance? Correlated.

Been to Youtube That’s part of google now. They know what you watch. Correlated.

Anyway, you get the idea. Google is almost everywhere on the internet. It is almost impossible to avoid them. Google and Yahoo have agreements, so going to Yahoo instead to spread your private data around …. well, it doesn’t work.

Recall the hoopla with DoubleClick.net cookie tracking 10 years ago? It is still happening. Guess who wants to buy DoubleClick? Yep, Google.

Google isn’t collecting all this data and correlating it for the goodness of mankind. They are out to make a profit. Yes, they provide great, free services, but what is the price of your privacy? Shouldn’t it be more than your privacy? Shouldn’t you be paid with a check for this data?
Car companies have been paying $150+ for this type of information for years. I’ve personally been invited to test drive cars for $150 about every other year and give my opinion. That opinion was only on the car, not my hobbies, friends, maps, all my email, calendar, documents, or web searches. Anyway, that puts a relative price on the data that google is capturing – say $400/yr for each of us – my guess. You obviously won’t pay that amount to use their apps, but that’s my guess for about what google is making on it. That’s a bunch.

Are you a google stockholder? Yep, I bet they correlate that too. ;)

IMO, google is worse from a privacy concern than Microsoft or the FBI or the NSA. What’s worse is we give them our data freely. Someday, I fear, it will harm us. Either by google making it available (free or not) or by it being stolen.

Just imagine when google buys Acxiom and a credit reporting agency like Experion. They will know all. And we won’t mind it even a little.

Right now, your only way to avoid google as a normal internet user … there is now way. Give up, but you don’t have to give them any more data by using their search and other tools either.