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From Matt Cutt’s blog:

“from working at Google for the last 7-8 years, I’ve seen firsthand how much Google works to protect users’ privacy. I personally believe that we take more precautions and safeguards than any other major search engine. We also strongly protect users’ privacy outside of Google (e.g. last year when the DOJ tried to get access to users’ queries, and Google was the only company out of 30+ that said “no” and went to court about it — and won). Note also the recent decision Google made to anonymize user queries after 18-24 months; other search engines haven’t really tackled this topic after Google made its decision. Also bear in mind that even if you sign up for a Google Account, you don’t need much more than an email address to sign up; other search engines ask for much more info.

Another point is that your ISP has a superset of data that Google has, because everything you do passes through your ISP. So your ISP may have much more detailed records about places where you go on the net, plus they have a verified identity with something like a credit card, and they actually know which IPs you’re on. With Google if you clear cookies and turn off your cable modem for a minute or two, you’ll usually get a completely new IP address. Google would have no idea that it’s the same person, but your ISP would still know, because they assigned the new IP address. Many of the questions about privacy I see are interesting because ISPs have more data than Google does, but you rarely see people ask questions about ISPs, even though at least some ISPs do sell clickstream data.”

If you have a home internet connection, your ISP has much more information (and personally identifiable!) about your online travels than Google could ever hope to collect. Yet you never hear people complain about their ISPs, only big bad scary Google.

Unless you only use the internet from anonymous public terminals and never sign up for user accounts, your privacy was gone before you ever made contact with Google. I think people just love to hate Google because it’s been so insanely successful at everything it’s tried. It’s an enormously powerful company, and that terrifies people. It’s the same reason even many conservatives hate “Big Oil,” as someone alluded to above.