Google Update

Google has been in the news recently. From it's alliance with strategic partnership deals with the likes of Dell, Apple, Motorola to Google's defiance of the Feds and it's compromizes in China, Google news is everywhere.

As a frequent user of Google products (most recently empowered by Picasa), I am most interested in ensuring that I am not trading off my privacy for convinience. The EFF has issued this warning about new features of the Google destop search engine:

Unless you configure Google Desktop very carefully, and few people will, Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn't even be notified in time to challenge it.

It is not clear why Google needs to transfer this data to it's servers in order to do desktop searches. I am guessing that the answer to this question may be even less unsubstantial as the reasons why Google saves "search terms":

keeping detailed records can help in identifying click fraud (faking clicks on Web ads to drive up a rival's cost), and in optimizing search results for different geographic areas. Compiling a user profile can aid in tailoring search results in products like Google Personalized Search. Also, disk storage is cheap, and engineers tend to prefer to keep data rather than delete it.