When will this rotten company stop mining data through misrepresentation and other ethically questionable means? Everything entered into Chrome's Search box is or can be logged, along with your IP, and who knows what else, given Google's history when deploying anything the end-user has to install.
This has to stop, and I doubt it will until the company develops some actual products generating actual independent revenue streams. Everything Google does follows Odysseus' example, and I echo Laocoon's sentiment to fear them, even bringing gifts. Search is changing and Google isn't leading the way because they don't have to. They have that market, and they're not doing anything because the only people they care about are themselves. They have no interest in the privacy rights of the user or in changing the way search works because they're making such a killing on their current model while every spy they've deployed gathers ridiculous amounts of information in the hopes that when search finally does change, they'll be able to put the info to use via swome cockamamie web-2.0 pipe dream. Users don't want some third-party databank holding their personal info, they want to be able to entrust it at will to search engines and other things that can make use of it to improve their experience. Locus of control; it's a fundamental golden rule in any kind of app or interface design. Part of the reason we search in the first place is because advertising is annoying and invasive, and we'd prefer to choose where we go from all the alternatives rather than who has the biggest ad budget and the loudest, most pervasive ads. Why? Because we know better than to trust Company A when they make an outlandish claim about their product or Company B who -simultaneously- somehow claims that A is wrong and their own product is in fact superlative. But internet search IS advertising, that's who writes the checks and that means relevance of search results boils down to a measure of who shells out the most to Google. What's next as bargaining chips is that glut of information Google's been collecting on what you do and where you go; when the stakes get high enough that information gets sold, or referenced, or amortized or digested but somehow winds up in the hands of those who will abuse, leak, resell and connect it back to you.
I'm not on some paranoid EFF-style rant here, I realize Google does what it does because it went into business to make money and that's fine, they've done very well at it and still provide a very useful, if ever-less-relevant service. I'm not accusing them of any fantastical plans to control the world, I'm just calling a spade a spade and reiterating that their primary means of doing business is unethical, dishonest, and predatory, and that Chrome is another fine example of how when a company with no product rolls a gift horse into your midst, for free (surprise surprise), you ought just not look it in the mouth, but go over it with a fine-toothed comb and then roll it back into the sea before it starts regifting itself.
