Can we stop with this "bill gates is watching your searches" nonsense? I know you're fascinating, but Brin and Gates may be concerned about many things not related your internet activity.
Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.
Corporations in data monitoring projects, OK.
I'll ignore the entire filter bubble issue and get right down to the privacy implications. When often people use search engines or other related websites (reddit search) to look up all kinds of information that in single snippets would probably be meaningless to most people, in aggregate it can paint an entire picture about that person, their interests, their computer activity and location through IP logs, and I would even venture to say we aren't too far off from a psychologist doing a persons mental profile from their search history in a court case, or even textual analysis of writing style to prove a person wrote something. (dangerous implications)
Google and MS are concerned almost entirely with our internet activity, as opposed to your claim. It is the core data metric of what makes them their shit-tons of money. More google than MS, but they are making huge moves into advertising (I have been doing SEO research for my company), and they are increasingly involved in politics of a questionable nature which include the NSA, the State Department, the CIA, and others.
So no, we will not stop talking about privacy, and if your argument is that privacy is dead, then at least skip the many times proven bad "if you have nothing to hide" implied argument you make.
On the other hand the fact that a specific person within those companies is not tracking your web activity doesn't make the privacy problem go away.
Nevertheless, I just find it silly when somebody just alludes that some actual person (e.g. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin) might actually track your specific searches; although I know nobody actually believes it, it's just a figure of speech, just to give a human body to our fears. That's the problem: corporation aren't humans, yet they have a life of their own.
EDIT: thanks to acheron for the name of the figure of speech I was mentioning. My point is that this personification is misleading and causes endless discussions about what can be expected by this or that company, and what you can expect from their employees etc.
The concept here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
If you could fit an entire Google data center into your mobile phone, maybe this kind of digital personal assistant could be taken offline, but for the current state of technology, big data requires the cloud. Even in the 24th Century, the Enterprise Computer is a centralized data store which tracks queries made from com-badges.
No. Another way is to make their behavior more predictable. If I type "Chinese" into the search box, Google may tell me about the Chinese language, or it may send me some ads for local take-out places. Either it guesses which I want, or it makes it easy for me to specify what I'm asking; I know which I'd prefer.
If I'm having a conversation with you about learning foreign languages, and then I ask you about Chinese, I expect you to know I'm not talking about food.
Having to overspecify a query that could be determined from context is particularly annoying on mobile, or via voice.
Sorry, it sucks.
Just because you have fifty different tracking, advertising, retargeting, etc. scripts doesn't mean you should use them all at once on your website.
In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.
In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.