I don't see any reason we should trust Google less with this than with normal search keywords, when the only difference is the fact that we don't hit the "Enter" button.

Whatever happened to "Do no evil?" Ah, "money is the root of all evil." It's great to be a cynic.

BTW, everyone should go by Scott McNealy's observation from years ago: "You have no privacy. Get over it."

And, just for giggles, watch this video: www.aclu.org/pizza

Ain't technology grand?

Ramibotros: The difference is they get to capture all your keystrokes, even when you haven't explicitly visited Google. And they get to know all the websites you visit, even when you're not doing a web search. And by storing your IP, you're associated with the information you typed, which can often make the information non-anonymous.

Johnny: How exactly is this evil? Google are entirely transparent about what is happening. Exactly the same thing happens if you have suggest on and use their web search page box (suggest will soon be default, apparently).

Exactly the same thing happens at yahoo and microsoft who provide suggestions. Exactly the same thing happens on firefox if you use the search box, with google and yahoo results.

Just because it's Google it becomes evil?

Or is it inherently evil to provide a service which can only work through this mechanism?

If you are concerned about Google having too much data about you, fine. Turn it off, or use something else. However, claiming it is evil is bizarre and suggests that you have an odd sense of morality.

<<And they get to know all the websites you visit.>>

Not quite. They can only know what you type in the search box and the suggestions you choose, if those suggestions are queries or URLs. So if I want to visit msn.com, Google will receive some of these queries:

m
ms
msn
msn.
msn.c
msn.co
msn.com

Google will not know all the pages you visit (because you can also click on links), it's likely that they'll get queries and some domain names. Very few people type complete addresses like blogoscoped.com/forum/139975.html.

In reality Google are a corporation. They are in the game to make money, not out of the goodness of their hearts. That's part of life. True enough as soon as I saw the Google Chrome link on Google search, I thought yeah that sounds good!! Then I thought...What kinda information do they pull off and hence I'm here.

I think it boils down to choice. If you like Google's products and are happy with the privacy terms...then use them. If not use something else. Use Dillo on Linux if you really want no invasive forces invading your privacy...or maybe even a text browser like Lynx...

I feel a headache coming on ;-)

JJ

If you haven't shut off Google's Web History feature, I can't see how Chrome is any worse in terms of privacy.

Ionut: True, but every domain you type into the address bar is still a lot of information.

And I don't think this is evil, just a bigger privacy concern than using a search website with suggest feature and I don't know if people would be aware of or understand the distinction.

Google has addressed the above mentioned issue by saying they'll anonymize the 2% data they gather from the Chrome omnibar within 24 hours:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/update-to-google-suggest.html