OK, here is something interesting I came across, while reading someone else’s blog. That person was saying that they are receiving a lot of SPAM, and in between that they just mention about they are not worried about Google scanning their email and customizing advertisements and knowing their online and personal life, and so forth and blah blah blah. Unless you have no online life what so ever or any techie interests, you should know that Google’s GMail has been very criticized for targeting adds by scanning the users’ email messages. As it is very well known many of the advertisement companies are trying, some with much success, tracking visitors to web sites which stream adds from their servers. So the on-line topic associated with privacy and tracking and reading your email, it has been going on for quite a while. Well, anyways, here is what one of the comments some had posted:

You may be overlooking the real “business plan” behind these types of services. 5 years ago I worked on a system that did exactly what Gmail is now accomplishing on a much larger level. We used natural language processing to parse data that users exchanged between each other, build relationships, classify those relationships, profile users, gather the data compiled, then sell that data to groups like landlords, background checking groups (which consulting to hiring firms), credit agencies, law agencies and more.

We had two SGI onyx machines running through the Oracle db all day processing the NLP systems and building this data. You can’t even imagine the depth in which information was retrieved about people - matching names to past jobs and current phone numbers matching to SS #’s, ex girl friends, legal disputes. I hope everyone doesn’t believe the data is staying online…

Only took us 1 year to build this system and it was only about 4 guys (few mathematicians). I don’t even dare to imagine what google has behind their system. I dont claim to know anything about google’s business plan but our data was in high demand so I can assure you those same groups have talked to google.

That is kind of scary in a way, is not it? And that’s just scratching the surface. That is just four guys.

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