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I'm amazed that these privacy experts are all quite happy with a privately owned company, Google, having complete access to all this information, not just on a summary level but linked to specific IP addresses.

And all of it without a single agreement with any of the people from which it has collected all this information, which Google claims is it's own intellectual property.

In other words, I trust the government with this information more than I trust Google. At least the goverment pretends to represent me, unlike Google, which wants to keep all my information in order to make money for itself by selling it to others.

I trust the government with this information more than I trust Google.

Google did not burn 90 men/women, and children to death for the alleged non-payment of a $200 tax. I think I'd trust Google more than FedGov any day.

I'm amazed that these privacy experts are all quite happy with a privately owned company, Google, having complete access to all this information, not just on a summary level but linked to specific IP addresses.

Are you saying that Google should not know what is happening on its own property, its owns servers? I have access to some of the same information that Google does, in regards to websites that I own or manage for others and traffic that comes across said servers. Free Republic has that as well.

And all of it without a single agreement with any of the people from which it has collected all this information, which Google claims is it's own intellectual property.

Now you are really confusing the hell out of me - Let me explain a few things - I'm not an expert, and if I'm wrong, hopefully others more knowledgable can jump in and clarify.

The information Google has, was obtained on Google's servers. They didn't send some kind of spyware down into your computer to pull this information, they simply logged certain bits of information traveling across their servers and their networks, that is very important to their bottom line.

Google has datacenters all over the world, literally. These datacenters are why you get such fast responses - if everybody had to search out of one datacenter in one physical location, things would be bad.

In those datacenters, Google has done some amazing things with clusters and load balancing. You can't have good load balancing if you don't know what your traffic looks like, or could potentially look like.

Those datacenters are constantly exchanging information - on websites that they have crawled (if you are concerned about your website being crawled, you can easily prevent it from being crawled, on levels of traffic, where the traffic is coming from, etc.

Sharing information between these datacenters is very important - for instance on one DC, such as 64.233.167.104, I may have 2000 pages indexed from one website, whereas 64.233.171.99 only has 1500 pages indexed from the same website. If Google doesn't collect the data, you end up with a mishmash of information, and while people in one location might be able to easily find your site, because of their DC, people being routed to another DC might not find your site, or find it as easily.

Moving over to searches and away from traffic information/analysis - those searches that you go in and type, are important to Google for two reasons:

The first is, unless it's changed, as searches are generated, they are saved, so that if you were to go to another computer and type in the same search, it will be much faster, because it already has found the information/results for that search term, and cached the relevant data. In the "old" days of the '90s, this wasn't always the case, and searches could be excruciatingly long. Now, if your daughter is going to a Hillary Duff concert, well other have probably searched on that already, and so when you type in "Hillary Duff concert, that search was done long ago, and you are getting the cached results, which is why it's so fast.

The other reason, is advertising, you know, the lifeblood that keeps Google's servers working.

If Google doesn't know how many people are searching for "Sony digital cameras", they don't have a good way of explaining to a potential AdWords customer how much traffic they might get, what their costs will be, etc.

Because of information Google has compiled in the past, I can go into AdWords, and I can say "I would like to buy an advertisement centered around the words "Sony digital camera". I say "this is how much I want to spend overall, and this is how much I want to spend on each individual advertisement/click".

Google's neat little software tools check the information they've compiled from people searching, and they come back and tell me "based on your overall budget, plus your per ad/click budget, this is probably where your advertisement will be placed (how many pages down), and this is the estimated traffic that will see your ad".

I'm not happy, so I bump my budget up, Google comes back and says "okay, now you are going to be in this approximate position (several pages higher in a search for instance), and because of that, your traffic is going to look like this".

If Google didn't have all of this information, and have it all together, we wouldn't have such efficient searches, and we wouldn't be getting truly targeted, contextual advertising, either as people seeing the ads, or as people publishing the ads.

Instead, advertising would be hit or miss, and so we'd end up with these big-ass pop-up ads everywhere that don't advertise anything we are interested in.

And without all of that advertising, a helluva lot of sites on the internet would not exist.

When your bandwidth/server costs run into 100s of dollars a month (or more), if you don't have the ability to recoup some of those costs, your little hobby site starts eating into your paycheck, and you have to take it offline. This used to happen a lot, before Google and others came in with good, targeted avertising.

We would literally be back in the '90s with these crappy little Geocities sites everywhere, that were constantly going offline because of bandwidth being exceeded.

Instead, you or I could setup a Conservative website somewhere, and we can do it for free, even if we don't have a group of dedicated people like FReepers directly contributing and it doesn't have crappy advertising all over it (it still might have advertising, but we get paid for that advertising, and it's usually ads that would appeal to Conservatives in this case).

I think I went off topic and rambled.

I suppose we could just shut Google down and allow only search engines provided by a taxpayer supported government agency, if that would be better.

In other words, I trust the government with this information more than I trust Google. At least the goverment pretends to represent me, unlike Google, which wants to keep all my information in order to make money for itself by selling it to others.

I went so far off topic that I forgot to respond to this.

I wouldn't trust the government that tells me it's doing everything it can to protect me and my family from terrorism, including heavy-handed searches at airports, while leaving our borders wide open.

As far as the information Google shares, they aren't sharing your personal details, they are sharing traffic patterns, regional information, common searches, etc. - nobody is being sold your personal name and address. If you and 1000 other people from your area searched for "kayaks", then they can tell a potential advertiser "hey, if you target this area, there are a lot of people interested in kayaks, that might be interested in your products"

As a matter of fact, if you want to see what I'm talking about, you can sign up for AdWords yourself: adwords.google.com - and you can see the kind of information I and others can easily see. It's going to bore the hell out of you, unless you have your own business or find statistics interesting.

In other words, I trust the government with this information more than I trust Google.

Well, not me.