Help
Interwebs founding father and Google evangelist Vint Cerf has insisted that when you search Google, the company doesn't know who you are.
Thursday morning, at a mini-conference in San Francisco, the always entertaining Cerf sat down with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg and other tech luminaries to discuss "open" mobile networks. But at one point, the conversation turned to the epic amounts of user data pouring onto Google servers across the globe.
As Mossberg started to complain about Google using Gmail and other sign-in services to tie more and more search data to real live people, Cerf quickly interrupted. "We still don't know who you are," said the Google figurehead.
Mossberg begged to differ, pointing out that as netizens sign-in to their Google accounts in order to use other services, the company also ties those accounts to search data. "When I search Google, you can see - right up at the top of page - that I'm logged in. You can see my Gmail address," he told Cerf. "You know who I am."
But Cerf insisted that even in those situations, Google doesn't know you. "You are somehow conflating things that I think need to be disaggregated," Cerf told Mossberg. "A Gmail identifier doesn't tell us anything. It's just an identifier. We have no other thing to tie that to. It's just an identifier [You said that already. -Ed]. And by the way, you picked it. We didn't."
As ridiculous as that may sound, it's a common Google argument. When a federal court recently asked Google to divulge the identity of an innocent Gmail user - if the account was still active - the company told us that wasn't possible.
http://www.theregist...ata_collection/
http://msmvps.com/ag...?PostID=1738463View the full article
