[quote=spdrun]Corporations are composed of people. Would you be comfortable with any one person looking over your shoulder at all of your Internet usage, email, documents, and searches? That’s what Google is trying to do, basically.[/quote]
It is unlikely that any one person has access to raw data through multiple services. And even for individual services there is large risk, it’s not like a DBA can run a query in the production environment with no audit trail.
But the data could be mined for patterns of risky behaviors. People at Target figured out how to recognize that a customer is likely pregnant by monitoring shopping patterns (spike in lotion consumption near the end of first trimester). Just as easily skilled miners could identify patterns of potential sexual predators, tax evaders and terrorists. We could stop all that before it happens!
