Continuing on my theme of worrying about the Database of Intentions and its use as a potential privacy trap, Greg Linden reports on insights gleaned from reading a Google paper on Bigtable, a distributed storage system.
One tidbit I found curious in the Google Bigtable paper was this hint about the internals of Google Personalized Search:
Personalized Search generates user profiles using a MapReduce over Bigtable. These user profiles are used to personalize live search results.
This appears to confirm that Google Personalized Search works by building high-level profiles of user interests from their past behavior.
Greg goes on to say that he worries this approach will not work so well for the task at hand, and I agree with him, but that’s not my topic for this post. What I want to point out is simply this: what rights do you, I, or anyone else have to edit, delete, or own these profiles?
Anyone from Google care to answer that one?