Google plans comprehensive personal databases

[Rodion Romanovich]

Why? What if I do this to search for news articles? Similarly, I heard some story about someone being arrested and interrogated for borrowing some communist book in either a European or American country. The problem was, he was a student in history and reading the book for research, but assumed to be a communist-terrorist for requesting it from his library. I don't believe a computer algorithm or human being either for that matter can draw very accurate conclusions about people's intentions or desires from looking at their log in a particular place.

One more example are those "customized ads" that appear. If you search for something that you have a temporary interest in, but don't want to hear a thing about once you've looked it up, you will still end up seeing ads within that particular field for months before they go away - really annoying. I actually tend to click more on banners that are randomly chosen, than about customized ads based on my visitor patterns. The customized ads incorrectly assumes that what I looked for once is something I'll keep looking for, whereas in fact I tend to NOT want what I've just looked at, because I hopefully found it and have no reason whatsoever to search for it again. Some of the "customized ads" are really bad, because they start customizing for you even when they only have data from 1 visit from you. Then this effect tends to get even worse.