Google's Super Bowl ad - video and instant analysis

If you move (change IP) Google will be able to track you if you use any of their sign-in services (example@gmail.com now regularly logs in from this IP instead of the old one). Your only chance of breaking this chain is either to regularly use proxies or to change IP and gmail (and other services) simultaneously.

Did you see the analysis of the AOL data leak? There is one particular woman in there where consecutive queries and a little editing show a story of her relationship with an abusive boyfriend, accidental pregnancy, abortion, and remorse.

People found it by, essentially, just grepping a flat text data file for terms they knew were likely to resolve to a hot button issue, then separating the wheat from the chaff. This is the "solution you can knock out in vi in ten minutes" answer. If you have a team of Google-style engineers, a large volume of search queries with unique IDs on them, and a Hadoop cluster available, you can make sift-and-winnow as many gigabytes as you have down to as few salient details as you want.

Trivial example: I would stake money on being able to correctly identify the gender of over 80% of users given 100 searches from them, and I would be able to do this with less than one day of programming. If you let me do it in other than realtime, I would be able to do this at terabyte scales using EC2 and Hadoop. And I'm just a guy who did natural language processing in college and has a bit of basic web-fu available. Think of what you could do with a talented engineering team, deviousness, and a few months to work on it.

But often they are. Example: I grew up watching James Bond movies - I still watch James Bond movies, and there will probably be many more Bond movies between now and when I die. It's a known quantity - despite whatever different directors have done to the franchise, it's a mainstay and recognizable part of my existence.

In some ways, it is a buddy that will be by my side as I go through life.

Now, I can be cynical about it and see Bond as merely a corporate, franchised brand being foisted upon me as the unsuspecting consumer... But I choose to see Bond as something genuine people have put genuine care into creating for my consumption. It's not nearly so bad if you put it that way, eh?

I don't think Google is entirely off its rocker trying to portray itself as my "buddy" - because it is. It knows everything I've ever wondered about, either publicly or privately, and so far anyway its products respond to my needs much better than any of its competitors (GMaps vs. MapQuest, for example).

Here's a thought: If you don't want Google to know what questions you ask - don't ask Google any questions.

But (almost) any publicity is good publicity, and this may inspire a few people to fly to Paris / get married in Paris / make a DIY crib etc, which has positive flow on.