Could Googling Take Down a President?
 

http://mags.acm.org/communications/200801/
Click "Contents", then the page 71 article

Apart from the fact that I can't read the article - too small written and blurred if magnified (not your fault) - we have a rule against political discussions here.
At least I assume that's what the article is about.

/Hugo

No, it's about technology and privacy, not politics. Don't rush to judgment.

The magazine name should have given it away--Communications of the ACM, where ACM = Association for Computing Machinery and is the primary professional organization for computer science.

As for the text being small--clicking into the text area zooms it to something that on my screen compares to 16 point size font, or quite a bit larger than the default font size on the forums here.

The whole magazine can be downloaded as a very readable PDF.

As far as the article goes.:apathic:

Interesting article, a bit on the conspiracy theorist side, but who doesn't like a good conspiracy theory every once in awhile?

I have had some similar concerns about search engines, especially as a Research and Development Engineer who works on confidential projects. By looking at my search strings, a reasonable guess could be made as to what my current projects are.

Certainly gives me food for thought.

Not to mention all your browsing habits can be tied in to these because Google ads are in most websites. I block all Google adsense related domains in my hosts file; it doesn't affect the search and gmail and they work fine with that.

Or if your extremely paranoid you could use a program like PeerGuardian 2 to automatically block domains.

Maybe so, maybe not; but we are darn sure that ogling can take down a president :D