I think the one of Larry Page's dreams is very different to most people's dreams, which would be one that respects people's right to privacy.
Let's say I'm in a strange town on a business trip. I've got to eat dinner. I ask Google for a good restaurant in my area. It can just give me a list of all the restaurants nearby, and that's quite useful. But it's tedious sorting through all the ones that I would never consider eating at.
Or, Google could know something about my eating habits, and start off with the restaurants that might actually interest me. That's a more useful result. But to get there, Google had to know some things about me.
Now, may want to be able to choose that tradeoff; certainly Google could do better at giving you controls for this. But the point remains: If you want results that are more useful to you, Google needs to know some things about you.
- Over 63% of the top 100k web sites embed their web bug ( http://smerity.com/cs205_ga/ )
- I have no data, but a huge proportion of web sites use Recapcha in their sign up process. It's impossible to use some domain registrars without revealing the IP address of the probable domain registrant
- I cannot host a web site without Chrome or Google DNS donating some huge percentage of data about my visitors to Google. I'm not sure the mechanism employed here, but I've set up 2 private web sites in the past year where upon having a Chrome user visit, Googlebot turned up within a day or so, despite all efforts to ensure the URL remained private
- I cannot visit Reddit and many similar sites with a cold web browser cache without revealing my use of the web site to Google, thanks to their AJAX library hosting
- A technical user has no difficulty blocking Urchin, but e-mail is a different issue entirely. I cannot find the article now, but one user reported 40% of all mail in his inbox passed through Google's servers at some point, even though he wasn't a Google user.
On the average day, whether I like it or not (and really I don't), I generate tens to hundreds of new records in Google's databases.
Not disagreeing with anything, but in case you didn't know, you can actually disable this in your reddit preferences: https://ssl.reddit.com/prefs/
Choose "load core JS libraries from reddit servers" under Privacy Options.
I submitted a Firefox addon for approval a few years back that introduced a separate cache for all the AJAX libs, but it was rejected for silly reasons
I have actually been looking for such an addon. I too clear cookies/cache/etc on exit in addition to using NoScript and a strict Adblock Edge (block social networks/tracking/not just ads). The only area remaining to be fixed would be the AJAX libs to be hosted locally.
Would you consider making a github page or something so you can provide the addon without being in the firefox addon explorer?
One of the major complaints in the rejection mail (included) was that the add-on bundled copies of all those libraries. So it seems reworking it to have a dynamic list of URLs, and fetching these once on first boot would go some way towards solving that. Unfortunately this further complicates how the redirection works, so I never got around to investigating it