What Else Does/Can Google Know?
I wonder if Google gets enough private data from corporate users accidentally pasting snippets of proprietary information into their search bars, to come up with some sort of snapshot of a company’s private inner workings.
Undoubtedly they do for individuals, but I imagine that information is much more comprehensive; for example, if I constantly search for glutton-free recipes, Google can likely infer that I, or someone I know, has a restricted diet for what can assumed to be one or a small set of reasons.
But at work, at least for me, the things I search for are often much more nuanced and detailed, and thus seemingly arbitrary.
For instance, I often Google function definitions, sometimes without realizing they’re from one of my company’s internal libraries and other times mistakenly all together, thinking I’m using one of my company’s internal search tools (which inadvertently happens to interface with Chrome’s search bar). This kind of information, from a consumer’s (e.g. Google’s) perspective, has to look much more like noise than correlated data, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is noise; perhaps, when augmented with the information corporate users provide through purposeful searches of publicly available information, filtering and refining this “noise” into something more useful becomes possible.