Google Blogoscoped

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

The Web’s Minority Report

We’re leaving a lot of digital tracks today... tracks which may be analyzed by future programs. Imagine this: it’s the year 2021. Robert is a teenage blogger, and he’s been blogging for 1 year now. The Automated Profiler didn’t like his blog, so Rob’s mom receives the following message:

Dear Mother of Robert,

Your son’s blog has been removed, and the authorities have been alerted. As you may know, our program automatically crawls the web to find potentially dangerous personalities. Robert, it turns out, blogged about several sensitive issues during the past year that triggered our alarm (including, but not limited to, him reading a fiction novel covering assassination, him mentioning suicide twice in December, and him referring to the word “bomb” in different contexts in positive ways).

... and so on.

Note: the Automated Profiler works on emails, too. You probably won’t hear about it until the alarm has been triggered...

[Thanks Siggi.]

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