The American Insurance Group is currently in the middle of what has been called a growing political firestorm, after allowing payouts of $165 million from government aid in bonuses to their executives. “People are right to be angry. I’m angry,” said president Obama this Wednesday. AIG, which has received a whopping $180 billion in a tax payer funded bailout the last six months, is now asking the people who received more than $100,000 to return half.

Google’s online ads have been targeting individuals since 2003. The ads’ messages are based on specific Google searches, the contents of the particular web-site viewed by the individual, as well as geographical location. In an effort to make their ads more relevant, Google has launched a beta version of “interest-based” advertising, anew spurring privacy concerns in its wake.

Oh noes, news industry. Ad revenues are plummeting, your journalists are disappearing, local television stations have insufficient resources to cover their communities, blogs are stealing your audience, nobody is paying for your content, and the Internet seems like the bully who shoved you off the top of the hill.

What is the mind? Eek! An element of the human being enabling its perception of the world? An element existing alongside the body as a separate entity? The inner cog wheel processing and storing experiences? The de facto primus motor searching to answer these questions? Well, yes. Yes, it is. Now, the question is where we can find the mind.

In 1998, Google’s search engine—then still in beta—answered 10,000 queries daily. Today, less than ten years later, that is their number of employees. Google’s services, which include the worlds biggest search engine, a blog platform, an RSS feed reader, an e-mail service, an entire web-based office suite and numerous other applications, are being used by millions every day. “The innocuous and ubiquitous web search box presents a significant and increasing risk to individuals and organizations” (2, p. 1), and every time these services are used, more information is gathered, organised and stored. We provide Google with a “progressively clearer picture of our personal and professional lives, the lives of our associates and the health, stratagems and structure of our private and public organizations” (2, p.1). The costs of high capacity storage has decreased drastically, which makes it possible for service providers such as Google to store huge amounts of data for a long period of time. Does Google represent a very real privacy threat?