Pick Me!

A weblog by Laura Moncur

7/11/2006

Google Knows Where You Live

Filed under: General — Laura Moncur @ 5:00 am

Google Knows Where You Live

The banner above is a screenshot of an ad I saw on Home on the Strange. The comic was called “Animal Control,” which explains the animal traps and pest control ads, but if you notice. The Nolan Pest Control ad specifically says, “Solutions for your Utah home.”

That means Google knows that I live in Utah, even though this webcomic doesn’t. Google AdSense is not only gathering information about the website it advertises on, but takes note of where the user is coming from to give directed ads.

This scares me…

I just hit the point where I feel like Google knows too much about me. I just tipped over into paranoia. I have my email through Google. They have scheduling and calendars. They are working on spreadsheets. They can track every websearch I do. They even know which websites I read without using their search engine and send me advertisements for my local community. That’s all nice and convenient, but I really don’t want them to know all that information about me.

All of a sudden, 1984’s Big Brother is looking a lot like a harmless search engine.

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3 Comments »

  1. It’s fairly easy to tell where someone is from based on their IP address. Google (or any other website) doesn’t need anything else and they get it by default if you’re viewing any of their content. You probably have my ip address now that I posted and you could figure out where I’m posting from. Try out http://www.domaintools.com/ or http://arin.net

    Comment by earme — 7/11/2006 @ 6:52 am

  2. I was going to say: it probably just picked it up from your IP address. http://www.ipchicken.com is a great way to display your IP and all the information you can get with it. However, it’s usually just the town where your Internet provider’s server is located. My IP at home is different than the actual town where I live.

    Comment by Eh... not so much — 7/11/2006 @ 2:25 pm

  3. Yeah, Google knows all about me too, and it occurred to me that they often know exactly where I am and where I’m going because I use google maps. Very creepy. They have a mic in development which will listen to the ambient sound in your home and then present google ads and “useful information” to match whatever TV show you are watching. I always wondered how the people in 1984 would allow that big invasive screen into their home… eek.

    Comment by Braidwood — 7/12/2006 @ 9:12 pm

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