[throwaway425]

Google's motive is to make money, and they do that largely through advertising. There's nothing ulterior about the motive I'm suggesting. More information on you means they can charge a higher price for the privilege of advertising certain products or services to you. Of course, the fact that the same information they sell to advertisers is also easily accessible by the government with a mere subpoena, if even that, is of little concern to Google, Eric Schmidt, or remarkably even to many HN posters in this thread.

[Karunamon]

I'm sorry, can you present a plausible scenario in which the government (or any other entity for that matter) cares which web browser I download?

And as to this: it's insultingly disingenuous - no, it really isn't. Every piece of web server software in the world keeps logs. Would you prefer they lied?

You seem hell-bent on damning Google for not doing anything particularly evil in this case. And it doesn't look like you're willing to have your mind changed, either.