Raw

Google Web History is a browser activity tracker, uses the Google Toolbar to gather attention data - what you search for and optionally where you visit. As Anil Dash puts it, it seems Good and Scary:

this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we're probably only used to getting from Microsoft

Check Anil's post for description. I've just enabled it for myself, despite heebie-jeebies. It looks useful and if I feel I have to talk in a whisper then the Bad People have already won.

Funnily enough, even before my recent trip to Seattle my personal trust feelings had shifted somewhat. Microsoft seem to have been tending in the right direction by embracing the web, with Google seeming like they're heading towards the web version of MS's traditional desktop monopoly*. Having said that I wouldn't trust any large corporation as far as I could throw them, especially since dodgy governments will no doubt have access to data like this. 

( * Disclaimer: I use OpenOffice on a Mac). 

I find this a bit weird :

Recent top queries related to your searches

1. ubuntustudio
2. miserable failure
3. keith richards
4. webmethods
5. melamine
6. rebecca griego
7. firefox 2.0.0.3
8. librarians are hiding something
9. adobe cs3
10. mastadon

Only half of these make sense. I'd never heard of 6, the connection between my searching for tourist info on Seattle and a particular violent episode there seems tenuous at best. 8 speaks for itself. I guess I should come out and admit my 5 fetishism, but clearly my searches for 10 pr0n have been a 2.

 

@en