A few years ago people began to Google themselves. They began to feed their name, plus a few details, to the open jaws of the mighty search engine and were delighted to read that they were mentioned, referred to or even listed in the hallowed halls of search results. However, due to increasing concern over data privacy, personal information and the growth of surveillance both on and off the internet, it might now be a cause for concern rather than delight if your details were returned in a Google search. Will it ever be possible to use search engines to find out deeply personal information about oneself, such as what we bought in our local supermarket last week? Or maybe it will allow me to find out what train or bus my boss took to work this morning? Data privacy and personal information are an old chestnut in the online community. Many of these issues have long been resolved in relation to both credit card details and personal information. If you were to ring any major credit card company right now and claim that your credit card had been charged without your authorisation, they would lead you to believe that the theft did not occur online or perhaps even electronically, but it was a human hand that stole from you. In relation to identity theft, the same cause and effect occurs; if the information being passed through call centres isn't guarded from human interaction, it will be open to attack.
Placing this in the context of personal information being stored in the cached results of a search engine, the danger posed here will surely come from the human element rather than the search providers; put simply, it is the crackers and hackers that pose the threat to personal information, rather than Google itself.
Personal information will never be available for identity theft from search engines for the same reason it is illegal to pirate, copy or distribute copyrighted material. You might not be personally offended to find that somewhere in the world, someone is illegally downloading the new James Bond film at this very moment; but you would surely come out fighting if people were downloading your high school grades.
