SAN FRANCISCO (March 15) - Google Inc. is adopting new privacy measures
to make it more difficult to connect online search requests with the
people making them - a thorny issue that provoked a showdown with the
U.S. government last year.

Under revisions announced late Wednesday, Google promised to wrap a
cloak of anonymity around the vast amounts of information that the
Mountain View-based company regularly collects about its millions of
users around the world.

Google believes it can provide more assurances of privacy by removing
key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24
months. The timetable is designed to comply with a hodgepodge of laws
around the world that dictate how long search engines are supposed to
retain user information.

Authorities still could demand to review personal information before
Google purges it or take legal action seeking to force the company to
keep the data beyond the new time limits.

Nevertheless, Google's additional safeguards mark the first time it has
spelled out precisely how long it will hold onto data that can reveal
intimate details about a person's Web surfing habits.

While Google will still retain reams of information about its users, the
changes are supposed to lessen the chances that the company, a
government agency or another party will be able to identify the people
behind specific search requests.

Privacy experts applauded Google's precautions as a major step in the
right direction.

The rest of the article is here:

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/google-to-adopt-new-privacy-measures/20070315061509990001?cid=2446

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I hope this is not a ploy to allow terrorists and pedifiles to roam
free...

Privacy is one thing but hindering criminal investigations is another
matter entirely.

Your Opinions?

I wonder what some people want to hide. Shouldnt be doing anything you
would want to hide anyways

I don't do anything wrong to want to hide it, but there are things
that should be private because, for example, I don't want retailers to
know what kind of items that I buy, then send me emails, or pop ups or
something tring to sell thier product when I'm perfectly happy with my
purchase. Also, has anyone ever done any searches where you may have
clicked links in some web sites that took you somewhere that you didn't
want to go? If that's not private then, these retailers/whoever might
think you wanted to go there and start pushing you for things that you
don't want.
I guess that our privacy kind of enables us to have more freedom of
the things that we do want, instead of things that we don't want.

Duchess,

Have you never had someone, maybe a gossip-loving person, take something
you actually did and completely distort it, take it out of context, tell
misleading stories about you loosely based on something that occurred?
I know you can't stop this from happening, but why encourage it?

If you give someone access to enough information about you, they can
selectively contrive whatever kind of picture about you that they want.

Also, civil disobedience can be a virtuous activity - I don't want the
state to be able to smear a good (activist) person's reputation just
because they were outside the social norm in their use of google.

I think online privacy is very important.