Is Google becoming the next evil empire?

I heard on the news this morning something about Google's founders getting close to being richer than Bill Gates.  Is money the root or the root of all evil?  I don't know.

I read this recent piece by Preston Gralla, Seven ways to keep your search history private.  I am interested in keeping my searches private from any big enterprise that could correlate my searches to me personally.  It's kind of like the big grocery store chains that give you a shopping card to track your purchases in order to market to you personally.  I don't mind the marketing as much as I mind that everything on my grocery list is in a database attached to my name.  A database that can be compromised.  I don't like it that anyone can compile data on me about my personal preferences, habits, or interests.  It's just an invasion of privacy.  The same feelings apply to the big search engines selling my information (searches) to marketing types.

After looking at Preston's list, I decided to install the Firefox extension to "anonymize" the Google cookie UID, so that I can still use gmail and search using the Google engine without my searches being correlated to my login name.  I also selected the option to not send any cookies to Google Analytics.  I still switch between Firefox and IE7, depending upon my mood.  I like FireFox, but IE7 gives you tabbed browsing and that was one of the main features I liked in FireFox.  I liked the fact that I could configure FireFox to delete all private information each time I closed the browser. 

In IE7, which I will not use for personal email, only surfing, with the phishing filter turned off (see below), I changed the location of where my Temporary Internet Files are stored to my local hard drive instead of the network server.  That way I can delete that information without worrying about it being backed up by a network server. 

Now, more about IE7's anti-phishing tool.  Did you know if you turn on the anti-phishing tool ("phishing filter") in IE7, IE7 sends the URLs to Microsoft.  So now you know that both Microsoft and Google are interested in what you do on the web.  Here's a direct quote from the Q&A on the phishing filter taken from IE7's help feature:

 "When you use Phishing Filter to check websites automatically or manually, the address of the website you are visiting will be sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as your computer's IP address, browser type, and Phishing Filter version number. To help protect your privacy, the address information sent to Microsoft is encrypted using SSL and limited to the domain and path of the website you are visiting. Other information that might be associated with the web address, such as search terms, information you entered in forms, or cookies, will not be sent."

Yeah.  Sure.  Right.  You have their word on it.  Between the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) tool and the phishing filter, you have to believe that Microsoft must be having data warehouse headaches right about now.  And they probably know more about me than I want them to.

When you are behind a corporate firewall, the IP address is going to be the public address of the company, so it's not like they can narrow that down to a specific PC.  But, if you are surfing from home, that IP address is associated with you personally by your ISP.

At any rate, we've standardized on IE7 for the desktop at work, but the IT and Security folks are all using FireFox.  That dang WGA tool gets reinstalled every time you patch your system, so I've given up trying to clean it out of the registry every time it installs.  It's futile. 

So what is my chief complaint?  I don't think anyone or any company who I buy products from should keep my personal identity associated with my personal browsing or shopping habits.  It's wrong.  It's no one's business.  And it's not about having something to hide.  I don't invite you into my house to browse in my underwear drawer?  If I invite you over, you are limited to the guest areas.  That's the way it's supposed to be.

My other beef is that storing information that people have not given you permission to store is sitting in databases or data warehouses that can be compromised.  That really unnerves me.