[stephenr]

I couldn't agree more.

The concept of trusting what is essentially an Ad company with a penchant for spending it's profits on projects to convince the tech community it's "cool" on anything privacy related is either the greatest practical joke of the 21st century or the reason we can't have nice things.

[minot]

Why in the world would Google disclose information about you to its customers when it can probably make more money by being squarely in the middle?

>> Hello, do you need to find someone who might be interested in buying Toyota cars? What's the message that you'd want plastered all over the Internet for this guy? OK, just sign this check and it will be done.

[stephenr]

At what point did I say Google was disclosing information about me?

Every software product Google puts in the market, from web search to Gmail to Google Apps to Chrome to Android - they are all about collecting personal information, building a huge bank of data about individuals.

I don't care if they never intend to disclose that information to someone else. I care that they are actively engaged in collecting the information in the first place.

Further more - online advertising can work just fine without collecting such ridiculous amounts of information about people. Let me give you an example.

A Toyota dealer (or the marketing department of Toyota itself) buys ads from a search engine.. let's call it.. Hoogle.

I decide i want to buy a new car, so I go to my favourite search engine... Hoogle... and I search for "new cars in <location>".

Somehow, through the magic of common sense, an ad, placed by Toyota, a CAR company, registers as being related to a search for "new CARS". They show me the ad.

Oh and look. They didn't need to circumvent browser security policies around how cookies are handled, they didn't need to scan all my email, they didn't need to track the SSID of my local Wifi network...