Forget Big Brother, Google is watching you

In the tug of war over privacy rights, we are witnessing nothing less than the birth of a new era: the age of surveillance capitalism

One morning in April 2002, a team of data scientists at Google arrived into work to find that a curious phrase had topped the previous night’s Google search queries: “Carol Brady’s maiden name”. The queries had come in five peaks, each at 48 minutes past the hour, in successive hours.

Eventually, they worked it out: Carol Brady was a character in the 1970s sitcom The Brady Bunch. A question about her maiden name ...