35 Million Google Profiles Collected 151
Orome1 writes "If you are one of those individuals that made their own Google Profile, chances are that you knew and agreed to the fact that the information you included in it will be available for anyone who searches for it online. But, maybe you haven't thought about the possibility of this information being harvested and indexed in order to make mining of it easier. Whether you have or not, it is ultimately irrelevant — you have shared the information with Google, and it does not forbid the indexing of the list."
the problem isn't now, it's the past. (Score:2, Informative)
These days, anyone who hasn't been living in a gave for the last 15 years knows that this kind of data is not private.
The bigger issue for having no searchable online presence is stuff from the early days of the internet, like 1980-1985. Back then, everyone posted (to usenet - this was long before the web) with their real names. Furthermore, nobody had any idea that someday all that would be archived retroactively. At the time, posts were considered ephemeral - once they decayed off servers, they were thought to be gone forever.
But it later turned out that archives of this stuff were saved by one person. It wasn't clear at the time - remember, home computers then commonly had 4 *kilo*bytes of memory, and no hard drives, and storage space was bloody expensive. Most people were online using big iron, and those accounts were attached to your real name by whatever organization owned the machine. Fortunately, I never posted anything under my real name that I'd be upset for anyone to find now, but some people did, and that stuff is traceable to them forever. Yes, you might be convince google (who bought the archives, originally made by Henry Spencer) to delete *your* posts, but not when what you wrote was quoted by others.
I don't have much sympathy for anyone now who isn't aware that anything you post is going to be data-mined out the ass, but in the early 80's, nobody knew - it was just a single individual in the entire world who was saving the stuff.
Re:Are you surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
No ... this ... is ... Captain ... .... Kirk.
This! Is! Leonidas!