People like to use this as a reason for being worried about the privacy policy change, but this story is about a government gone very wrong, not about some company targeting ads to you based on ads you've clicked. The problem here is that the government can go on warrantless fishing expeditions, not that Google remembers that you dressed up as a suicide bomber and did 'shrooms. The secondary problem is that the government has some problem with those things; I know of no law that prevents you from entering the United States because you were a suicide bomber for Halloween.
Yes, it's scary if an authoritarian regime with something against you knows everything you've ever done in your life. But the solution is not to stop living your life, it's to prevent the government from throwing away the Constitution.
There's also a lesson in there about what happens when anyone gains the power that comes along with that much specific information about anyone and everyone.
That much valuable information attracts not only the government, but also the criminally motivated and those seeking power over others. All of it's scary – and we're willingly going along with it, at the moment, because it's useful for us, in the short-run.
But this is nothing new. Remember Steve Jobs's FBI file that showed up here a week or so ago? The government visited all his contacts and compelled them to spill the details on what Jobs was really like. That's essentially the same scenario described in this story, and it's already happening every day. But not via Google search, via good old fashioned detective work.
That approach doesn't scale and it doesn't allow for anywhere near the fishing expedition opportunities that a centralized data repository would allow.
Also, that methodology means that data is only centralized during or after an investigation and not en masse, before one – making it less likely that a random person's data will be available for theft via a hack, etc.
Old fashioned detective work is expensive and labor-intensive. Which means it will be only used when there's really something at stake. Also, your contacts might tell you that they were interrogated later on. It is visible.
Data mining is different because it can be used against everyone at the same time, and because it is completely invisible. This has never been possible in the past, at least not at this scale.
It is new to me, and probably more relevant now than it was in 2007. If anything, noticing the date only amplifies Cory's apparent foresight at the time.
"It's important government doesn't get their hands on private information"
Those don't go together. Government will get their hands on this stuff if it's stored by massive corps that collaborate with the government. Or, even if the corps don't collaborate, the ISPs will. The USA be settin' up Gigamons everywhere.
Yes, it's scary if an authoritarian regime with something against you knows everything you've ever done in your life. But the solution is not to stop living your life, it's to prevent the government from throwing away the Constitution.