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Straight back at Eric Schmidt: "If you have to look at people's personal data to do something, maybe you shouldn't be doing it"

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How would a search engine that doesn't look at your search string work?

Cuil answered that question very definitively :D

Of course it needs your query string, but it could run your search and then forget about it. Arguably Google was better when it didn't take your history into account when calculating the results.

[citation needed]

You certainly could argue that, however, if it were true in most cases Google, a highly data-driven company, would be still be working that way.

Perhaps, "if you have to retain people's data..."?

Retaining my data makes it easier for Google to give me good results in the future.

The problem is not that Google stores your data. The problem is that disclosing that data has social and legal consequences. Why shoot the messenger?

I think they should allow us to opt out of retaining our data.

You could just not give them your data in the first place.

I am not worried about search / email / etc., though, I am worried about Analytics. I would like to be able to globally disable it. (NoScript solves this problem, but Analytics should be opt-in, not opt-out-by-blocking-Javascript.)

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