It’s somewhat amusing to hear people get all worked up when they hear reports about the government spying on them — don’t they realize corporations have been spying on them for a long time? From Google’s personalized search, to Twitter’s advanced search feature. When I type Google.com, Google already knows that I’m from Canada and automatically redirects me to Google.ca instead. Familiar with Google Earth? How about Google Street View? As for Facebook, I can’t read your profile if you’ve decided to make it private, however I can snoop around and get a pretty good idea of who your friends are and if they don’t have private profiles, I’ll have access to all their information, from which I might be able to scrape together quite a bit about you. Looking at my traffic logs, I can see exactly how long people spent on this site, I can see your IP address, and from that IP address, I can often get a pretty good idea of where you live. Cookies on the Internet are even better than the ones you eat — at least for spying on people.  If I can find one of your domain names, say, one that you’re using for your email address, I can then do a WhoIs lookup and if you didn’t privately register your domain, I’ll have access to your name, address, email, and telephone number. I can use DomainTools to find out what other domains you own or even spy on nameserver activity. If you bought your domain off someone in the past, I can find out who that was and using DN Sale Price, I’ll probably know exactly what you paid for it if you bought it at a domain marketplace/auction. I can put a keylogger on someone’s computer and monitor their every word or I can put an internet filter on a computer accessed by minors to make it harder for them to access websites I don’t want them accessing.

How about I develop a software engine that “crawls through blogs, forums and instant messages to eavesdrop on teen conversations online, providing marketers, movie studios and even politicians with detailed, instant insight into the buzz about their products and competitors” or Echometrix with 132 million recorded teen conversations? (See Pulse article on Canada.com). How about an even better way to spy on blog comments? Or how about we just cut to the chase and read your thoughts already?

There’s nowhere to hide

Related posts:

1. Google Chrome OS
2. Australia Internet Filter Trial
3. Private Domain Name Registrations: Why go through all the Trouble?