You never thought of that,… or maybe you’re scared of that. What does google know about you? You can say that there are at least 2 types of info google picks up about us: the information we tell him/give him, and the information we don’t, but it is our behaviour online.

What do we tell google about ourselves?

• A good way to tell google about yourself is your google profile, that is: contact info, about you, the blogs you write, websites you work for, any links related to you, where you have been on the earth, the sidewiki, your picassa albums picture flow, etc.
• Google dashboard – google picks up from online the services you use and centralizes them, allowing you to change your personal data in these accounts: the blogger account, calendar, the contacts, google docs, gmail, iGoogle, orkut, picasa, the profile, google reader, google talk, google voice, google voice, and your web history – your history/items in these services.
• whatever you put online about yourself and is searchable, starting from a website, a blog, twitter, a profile page, a network, a forum, etc. Or what the others say about you.

What we don’t tell google about ourselves, but he knows/picks up/learns about us

• our web searches and web history, our preferences – if or even if not we’re logged into our google account. He records this and then personalizes your results according to what you last time visited – he “learns” you….
• your emails tell google what kind of adds to display, depending on the words you have in the emails; the same with the google chat: google picks the words/people you talk to/about the most…. your preferences…
• your google docs tell google about you, your preferences, your collaboration, your friends, your trends, and it offers you an unlimited space where you can put your docs online;
• if in the States, your google voice – the transcribed conversations, google taps into them…. – not harmfully, “do no evil” being their motto;
• all the google services you use, whether on the desktop or online, tell google a little about yourself. You may not know that much about your preferences, but google learns from you, adapts, serves you what you want…. Maybe you use google docs, gmail, google calendar, google desktop(nice, useful, customizable, gadgets), igoogle, google chat, youtube, picasa, google notebook, google maps, google earth, the google search engine + various versions of it, google checkout, google analytics, google trends, google toolbar, etc(a list can be here).

Uhm… these articles are supposed to be short…. yet this one is interesting: google offers more and more free products, “free versions of the existing commercial products/softwares in the market“, and we gladly use them(they are free, they are online, you just need… a browser! By us using them, giving feedback, or even without it, google learns of our behavior, our personality, preferences, etc… Guess what: even if we don’t use the google products/services, by indexing the web, google finds you/about you wherever you are! Even on facebook, even with your secret profile, he finds you in your friends’ friends list! Same on twitter. So why not be open about it all and create your profile, “feed” google with the information you think is relevant about you…

Should we be scared about that? I honestly don’t know. What I know is that it is getting more intense – addictive – interesting. With google wave, with the other startups that have such cool features that we use & then google buys them,… I don’t know….