Ask HN: How close are we to a point when Google can ruin your life?
Hardly a day goes by anymore without Google committing some new outrage against personal privacy...even that of non-users. The London Review of Books - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n19/daniel-soar/it-knows - has one of the better roundups of the current state of Google's surveillance against its users.

I'm not here to rehash the online privacy debate, but to ask a new question. One of the things implied by the article is that given the voiceprints and images Google already has on file, it's relatively trivial to write an app that can identify anyone within a minute or two; the only thing actually preventing it from happening right now is that the API's either don't exist, or aren't available to the public.

Another thing implied by the article is that Google itself is attaining a certain level of sentience, or at least an ability to understand the contexts and meanings of what it reads. Google is improving itself constantly by absorbing and collating the information it receives through its billions of sensory organs. Presumably it's doing the vas majority of this without human intervention.

And then there's this in New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/08/facial-recognition-identifies.html - which basically says that Carnegie Mellon has an experimental app that runs the same facial recognition and, once it's identified you, tries to find your place and date of birth in public records; which, once found and taking it several steps further, allows the app (or another app) to make a reasonable guess as to your social security number.

Now. Google asked a friend of mine for her date of birth today, before letting her get back into the Gmail account she had for the last seven years. (It's hard to imagine a 6-year-old opening a Gmail account in 2003, but apparently they were worried she was under 13). What's interesting is that it didn't ask for my DOB. So I went to Google's Privacy Pages, which purport to list the information Google has on file about you. Nowhere in those pages was my date of birth. YouTube has me at 31 years old, but doesn't show my DOB itself. Which is interesting, because they must know what it is.

Nor is there anywhere in Google's privacy pages where it shows the biometrics of my facial features, or my voiceprint, although presumably those are also on file. In fact, there's very little real information shown there.

So, all that being the background, here's my question: What if Google -- the sentient thing out there, not the puny corporate hacks who are nominally in charge of it -- decided to ruin your life? I don't mean by de-ranking your website; I mean by really, seriously screwing with you? Could it forge your identity and rack up credit card debt, making it seem like the perpetrator was someone in Nigeria? Could it fake a photo of you cheating on your wife? Could it take over your bank accounts, guess your other passwords, or subtly alter your outgoing gmail messages to make them offensive yet plausible? How far are we from the point where it could do those things on its own?

And lastly, how close are we to the point where writing "fuck google" on the google forums will cause it to lose its temper?