Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead

Google: opt-in should be the default. This would really save them much of the agony.

And can someone please kill the cookie model of doing business? Cookies should be limited to storing session info across one site only. Many people (I can't say that most) at least take this for granted.

I'm all for personalization, but tracking of individual activity without a user's knowledge is disaster waiting to happen.

The visualization at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330970457541... (linked from this article) is just terrible - it's at the very least a pointless way to display the time data, at worst deliberately misleading as to what the size of the green parts represent (a quick view of that animation would make a viewer think "ZOMG, they're using more and more of my search data as time goes on, aaaagh, and everything else is getting worse, too!").

I'm all for interactive data viz, but come on...nothing bugs me more than a flashy moving chart that obscures the data that it purports to present.