"She had a child not too long ago,” A says. “And these days she's out buying diapers all the time." He knows this not because he hired a private eye to dog her steps. "My ex has the same e-mail address as before,” he reveals: and that is how he knows these things. From time to time, he simply types his ex-girlfriend's e-mail address into the world's no. 1 search engine Google, and all sorts of things pop up.

The results satisfy him. Last time, he came across a product appraisal of a certain kind of diaper she had written online. He also has access to her child’s gender, age, and weight, knowing probably not much less than the father. A woman working for a local firm says a male colleague sometimes embarrasses her by saying things like, "The three-piece swimsuit with the bubble print on it would sure look good on you; you're a size XX, right?" Colleagues knew all about a swimsuit she had bought to wear on vacation, down to color and size, and she suspects the man is tracking her. She racked her brains trying to figure out just how he would know such things, but then it all became clear.

The man knows the e-mail address she uses, and she spotted him typing it into the Google search window. Because she uses the first part of her e-mail address -- up through the @ symbol -- as her user ID on a host of other sites, tracing her is even easier.

She had bought the swimsuit a few days earlier on the online marketplace G Market, and then left a review of the product online. At times, Google cuts as sharp as a knife-edge, constantly scouring over web pages to show users everything they are looking for, and more. Users’ personal lives are no exception. These days so much commerce is done over the Internet, and most users in Korea leave reviews after the transaction, that there is no way to avoid the reach of the search engine.

People are wary of exposing their registration numbers, but very few are that cautious about their e-mail addresses or user ID. Even if someone does obtain your registration number, they would still have a difficult time obtaining personal information about you. But using the gleaming sword of Internet search, no secret is safe. The swimsuit woman, wise after the fact, tried to change her e-mail address and user IDs, but that proved virtually impossible. "At one website run by SK Telecom, I tried to change my ID, but they told me that I'd have to first cancel my service and then sign up again," she says. If she does that, all the bonus points she has collected, all the messages she has written and all the e-mails she has received would be gone in an instant. On top of that, she has registered with scores of websites and services using that e-mail address. She had to resign herself to a transparent life.

Search engines are violating laws on privacy protection, critics charge. Google said last year it was capable of searching 8 billion web documents. One year later, that will have increased several times.

Chang Byung-gu, the head of search technology developer 1noon, which was recently taken over by Naver, said Naver is developing technology to search 1 billion documents, about triple the current capacity of 200 or 300 million web documents. If Google is a sharp-edged blade, Naver is a rusty sword, so to speak. But Naver rules the Korean search market, beating Google for one simple reason: it provides a Korean language-based service, though habit among Korean users may also play a part.

Korean is a difficult language for foreigners to learn. Missionaries used to say Korean was made by Satan to thwart their work, and it remains fiendishly tricky, being designated as “superhard” along with Japanese, Chinese and Arabic in a report on the language skills of U.S State Department staff presented to the Senate by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the United States Congress. But e-mail addresses and IDs consist of English letters.

Another reason behind Naver’s impregnable dominance is that the Korean search engine blocks Google from looking up web documents in its search directory. Naver has exclusive access to the information stored in its directory.

Korean Internet users tend not to read web pages during their search and rely on information acquired from online cafes and blogs. Internet portal Daum says less than 10 percent of Korean Internet users read websites among the total search results: in other words, they think Daum and Naver represent everything there is on the Internet.

It is an open secret that Korean search portals want users to believe that. Korean search engines seem to think they have the exclusive right to information they have compiled in their own directories. But Daum de facto gave up on developing a search engine and now uses Google, which means users here unwittingly use Google when searching through Daum. That way, they can peep into other people’s private life, even their underwear size and brand name.

In this situation, the Ministry of Information and Communication is going in precisely the wrong direction to tackle the private information violation problem online: it just counts how many resident registration numbers are leaked on the Internet. But you find little personal information about other people by typing in their personal identification numbers. The government seems unaware of the more serious problem that it is e-mail addresses and online IDs that are used to violate people’s privacy. Or perhaps it does but lacks the wherewithal to think of ways to combat the problem. The march of IT is no guarantee of human happiness. Google, Naver and Daum may be watching you.

(englishnews@chosun.com )