On OLN in Canada is a program called Mantracker that I watch quite regularly. This is where experienced Search and Rescue tracker, Terry Grant from the Foothills Search and Rescue Team in Alberta tracks down contestants in the mountains of remote Canada. Each week he and a buddy track down two individuals who team to get to a finish line 40kms away from the start. Using only his tracking skills, looking for clues in the dirt and mud, he skillfully hunts his prey over the course of 36 hours.  He employs a technique of reading tracks called forensics. This is where elements are bought together to paint a picture of the prey’s whereabouts.

Meantime I am looking through all the accounts that I have online and realize that all tracks seem to lead back to my Gmail account. Aside from the obvious mail, flickr, Blogger, Google Sites, adwords, adsense, You Tube, and Maps, it is also attached to Facebook, Stumbleupon, Mybloglog, Gravator, Newsvine, Reddit, Digg and many others.

It would not take much for Google to employ forensics to create a full and complete view of my actvities online and paint a picture of how and what I do online to a much greater degree than what is possible from straight search logs. Indeed search logs only reflect about 10% of my activity and are exceedingly boring (most research on what to blog about).

What it does however is show to Google, and any other interested party, a complete picture of how and what I think on a wide range of subjects. It so happens that I commit many of those thoughts to blog postings, but there is plenty of stuff that I would prefer not or explicitly don’t express an opinion on.

The challenge will be in the future will be for the keepers of this information on the straight and narrow, to keep the information inside boundaries of what the information was originally intended for. Are we really ready for large corporations to know so much about us. We of course already surrender vast amounts of information to financial institutions but this is different. Are we to trust these companies at their word or will the time for legislation to protect users be nearing?.