Good Morning Silicon Valley

Google has expanded its Search History feature into something that, with your permission, will keep track of everywhere you go on the Web, making the full text of visited pages searchable. The new Web History is giving some people goosebumps, but for different reasons.

On one hand, there’s the undeniable convenience of being able to retrace your steps or find that one bit of information that caught your eye in some previous wandering. It’s a neat application, with a timeline of your browsing and graphs of your surfing activity. You need to opt in to use it, and you have the option to pause the tracking function (if you’re headed into one of the Web’s sketchier neighborhoods) or delete entries after the fact.

On the other hand, as the price for this convenience, you are handing the complete records of your online travels over to a company that likely already knows a ton about you and has not been exactly transparent about how it uses that information. As Anil Dash writes, “Outside of the world of users who gawk at every shiny new thing on the Web, though, this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we’re probably only used to getting from Microsoft. … Google is still in a period where most users on the Web feel they are a relatively benevolent company. And it helps that the new product is excellent, useful, and unique. But with the release of Web History, especially in the context of its recent acquisitions and announcements, Google may have crossed the line where regular users start to react with skepticism and caution instead of unabashed enthusiasm.”

This has long been the implicit tradeoff facing users of Google’s products; the company’s slogan should really be “Empowering you to help us.” But some backlash is building. Today, three online privacy groups filed a complaint asking the FTC to block Google’s planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick unless guarantees of user privacy are forthcoming (see “Don’t worry, son — those antitrust blemishes just mean you’re growing up“). “Neither Google nor DoubleClick have taken adequate steps to safeguard the personal data that is collected,” says the complaint, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Moreover, the proposed acquisition will create unique risks to privacy and will violate previously agreed standards for the conduct of online advertising.”

Google’s response to such arguments comes down to a declaration that the company is not being run by idiots. Said deputy general counsel Nicole Wong: “User, advertiser and publisher trust is paramount to the success of our business and to the success of the acquisition. We can’t imagine taking any actions that would undermine these relationships or the trust people have in using our products and services.”

So what about it — how comfortable are you knowing that when you use Google tools, you become a Google tool?