Om Malik has a good article on “Living a Cached Life“.
I used to while away the boredom of being on a Mac help-desk (there were never many calls and yes, there were nearly a hundred users..) by looking things up (wasn’t Altavista the rage back then?).
I used to be the top hit in Altavista. Put my name in and there I was. These days, in google, I have to add a geographical limit to get something that even resembles me. My name is obviously the most common name out there.
Now, it was freaky enough to see the information I could find out about me. It’s freakier seeing the information you can find out about other people. Add that to the areas of the world which are well covered by Google Earth and you’ve got a bird’s eye view of just about everyone.
Om Malik calls out for some recommendations of privacy tools. The only one I can think of is the built in FileVault but, frankly, I have neither the inclination nor the trust (and certainly not the disk space).