Following quickly after the beta release of its new Desktop Search technology, the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) unveiled on October 18 the latest product in its ever-growing line of search utilities, Google Life Search. After installation on a computer in a user’s apartment or home, Google Life Search uses a stream of magnetically targeted electrons to index a user's memory. The results are then accessible through a web browser.
Google based the software on its Internet search engine, and technology it acquired from MindScan, which it picked up with money raised in its IPO. It takes up to three days to index a person's entire brain, during which time the person must remain motionless in front of the computer.
Laura Casper, Google's director of consumer web products, said that Google thinks of it as the photographic memory users never had, that after users type in what they are looking for Google Life Search will quickly locate that item, and that if a user enters “car keys” and Life Search responds with the result “in your pocket”, then they are right where it says.
Although Google has stressed that the company will not be able to peer into people's thoughts, privacy advocates claim that this is another step by the search engine giant into people's personal lives. Joshua Brandt, from the independent privacy review firm Public Privacy Research, stated that this is the end of the personal privacy, and that Google knows everything users read on the web, searches users’ e-mails and now knows about the dope hiding in a user’s sock drawer.
