Privacy and general consumer protection on the Internet is no longer exclusively limited to the safeguarding of personal financial information such as credit card numbers and bank accounts.  Other personal information is being given out each and every day simply by using any major search engine.

In “Google: Technological Convenience vs. Technological Intrusion”, an article from the upcoming release of Online Consumer Protection: Theories of Human Relativism (edited by Dr. Kuanchin Chen, Western Michigan University, USA, and Dr. Adam Fadlalla, Cleveland State University, USA) Quinnipiac University (USA) researchers Andrew Pauxtis and Dr. Bruce White explain how search engines like Google log much of what their users search for and then use that information to their advantage.

“With hundreds of millions of logged searches each day, a search engine like Google can analyze everything from cultural and economic trends right on down to what a given user is thinking or feeling based on their searched queries,” write Pauxtis and White.  “This collection of information is a smoking stockpile of marketing data that can then be utilized to build or better render other personalized, content-targeted services.”

Today, Google continues to amass one of the largest collections of search data in history.  Researchers Pauxtis and White point to increased acquisitions (such as Google’s prior 2006 acquisition of YouTube) as likely to even further its growth.  As for the future of search engines, it remains to be seen whose hands this data will end up in, or how Google will use it to their maximum advantage.