> The official title of the article is "How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect", and the writing itself is much more neutral than this submission title.
The submitter just removed the "How to" crud from the title! :)
If that encroaches too much on your ability to neutrally assess a topic title, well, this ain't gonna be your century.
> It's doubtful at best that Google's "log" of you would become compromised (unless your personal account were compromised, but then this would have been a problem anyways!). It also isn't the case that some Google employee is reading row after row of Google's customer DB snooping on individuals.
Both of these cases have happened in the past.
Personal accounts have been compromised. That this sucks for other reasons doesn't make it less of a problem--labelling your house keys with your home address is still a stupid idea, regardless of whether losing your house keys "would have been a problem anyways!".
Google employees have been snooping on individuals (minors, even) in Google's customer DB. They were fired on the spot, but afaik no legal charges were pressed.
So basically you just told yourself a pretty lie, writing what you want to believe, not the way things actually are. How can you speak of neutral writing?
And then there's of course the government requests:
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/
See, on one hand I can see your point. IF all my data would forever remain under the sole control of Google AND will only ever be used in the ways they tell us it is used now THEN yes I concede there is little practical concerns to be worried about.
But if you believe those two requirements are met today and will remain so as long as Google possesses relevant data about yourself, you are deluding yourself.
The data is already being given to the US government and maybe others too.
Data leaks are not going to get less, and exploits will not stop to be found, and at some point it'll be Google's turn.
Finally there's the possibility that Google will have a change of "mind" and either turn evil, sell their data, starts doing less conscionable types of data mining, or maybe simply becomes utterly lax in protecting your data. It's a risk.
Combine all those risks and it'd be pretty naive to just ignore the facts and hope for the best.