The Big Brother

If asked, what would be the scariest webpage I've seen in recent times, I'd have to say, this.
While confirming thoughts about the big-fish-eating-the-small-ones world economy that we're moving towards, it raises enormous questions about privacy.
Think of this, this is a company that started off 12 years ago. They used a search algorithm running off enormous server farms, their USP being the delivery of the most relevant search results in the shortest time. All fine, until a few years ago when they made the search algorithm public. Why would a company make their biggest trade secret public? Because they're supporters of Open source? I don't think so! Their reason was that they had shifted their search algorithms long long ago. Since their inception, google has been tracking the search habits of every internet user, using a combination of IP addresses, geotracking, cookies etc. The biggest thing that helped them in this move was their SSI concept(the idea that once you log into one google service, you don't need to login for another one again). Every search you've ever made, is stored in the Google database, with information on what websites you clicked on, how long it took you to find what you were looking, etc. They now use this information, in various ways, using neural algorithms, to target search results. In fact, if you don't feel scared yet, do visit this page. Once you're logged in to your google account, this page shows you some of the data they've recorded against your google account. Not only does it tell what you've been looking for, their stats can say a lot about your internet surfing habits. They can show graphs to show your daily search activity, weekly search activity, or monthly search activity. From that, your sleeping habits, etc can be guessed too.
Not scared still? Lets think of whatever we do on the internet.
Search, as I mentioned, is already in their hands. When they released the GB+ mail service, they moved all the world's email to their servers. With Orkut, they have your social networking history.
With Adsense, they're tracking you on every website you visit that has a google ad. It is supposed to keep a database of what kind of websites you visit and what kind of ads you click, so as to serve more relevant ads in the future.
Youtube, is a case that should be looked at with utmost scepticism. Google already had a product in the video line, the now video meta-host, Google Video. Technologically superior, faster, slicker, with richer content, it was above Youtube in every way except for one, traffic. When Google bought Youtube, what they actually bought, was the ability to keep track of people's video viewing habits.
With Google Desktop, they're indexing your desktop files. With Chrome, you're telling them even about the few websites you're visiting that Google has no way of tracking. As if having a 'Google Toolbar' to track your web activity wasn't enough, they had to launch their own browser to make sure they don't miss out on any 'trackable' information about their customers.
With Picasa, you give up your pictures and with them, information about the places you've visited, the people you've met etc in tags and descriptions.
With chat, they keep track of what you're talking about with your friends. A particular case in point here is the incident that happened in my college last year, where people were caught on the basis of chat record(which no one knew was being logged until then).
Blogger, of course, is another part of our lives we're feeding Google with. A few others would be Calender, Docs, Notebook, Reader, Froogle etc etc.
If you're not scared yet, take my advice, go take a look at how huge a portion of the internet traffic google owns, I'm sure it'll scare you too.