If you have watched movies like Die Hard 4.0 or War Games you can potentially know how much can be done with information on centralized systems. Though the themes of these movies are fiction, reality is quite close or even worse.
Consider the amount of information Google has. They have an awful lot of data. They record everything. They have your IP address, your search requests, the contents of every e-mail you’ve ever sent or received. They know the news you read, the places you go. They’re even collecting real-time GPS location and DNS look-ups. They cache web pages, have history of pages that don’t even exist currently. They know who you friends are, where you live, where you work, where you are spending your free time. They know about your health, your love life, your political leanings. ‘They even know what you are thinking about’ – quotes Marlinspike
While it is being claimed that IP addresses is kept for 18 months and anonymized immediately, privacy experts have alleged that even with anonymized user data, where bits of the IP address are changed or deleted, it is still relatively easy to correlate those addresses with user cookies to get a lock on a search engine query author’s identity.
I was myself surprised to see that Google web history not only records what I search but also what I browse. With it wide rage of services and rising popularity Google will be set to have more information about the whole world than sum of other organizations put together. While Google is an organization people trust, security of its systems especially from Chinese hackers is a big question?
Ref: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/google-even-knows-what-youre-thinking/6291
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