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As someone who has been harassed for urban photography, by law enforcement, I think that's a very different situation. Having someone in a position of authority mis-interpret innocent actions is a much more threatening thing than someone doing it for commercial reasons. A vendor can bug you but they're not going to detain you based on their guess that you might be interested in what they're selling.

I raise this primarily because it seems like conflating an innocent mistake with overzealous / threatening law enforcement devalues the latter problem.

But there's no reason that search engines should be limited to trivial searches of public data. A modern search engine needs to be able to handle situations like:

* User has a reservation at a local restaurant, so they ask [where's lunch] and want to receive the time and location of their reservation. And they want driving directions, unless they don't own a car, in which case they want directions from the nearest public transport.

* User just got back from Hawaii and wants to show their coworkers a photo they took of a cool wave. So they search for [wave picture] and want the picture they took to be in their search results.

* User is writing a PhD thesis on tree rings and found a useful article last month, but now they want to cite it and can't remember what it was called. So they search for [article about tree rings] and want that particular article to be the first result.

In other words, the 2001 model of a search engine as "grep for the web" is far behind what people expect in 2013.

Everything Google does is about ad sales. Self driving cars? What are you going to do when your car does the driving for you? Consume media of course, with ads all over it! Etc, etc. Which is not a good or a bad thing in and of itself, it's what they do, like McDonald's sell hamburgers. The question you must ask yourself is do you want Big Mac and Fries for every meal?

1. When DOJ sent Google a subpoena for search logs, Google fought it in court, while Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL did not: http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/...

2. Google is lobbying to change federal law to require search warrants backed by probable cause and signed by a judge for stored cloud email (and Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, etc.) files, a privacy protection opposed by the Obama DOJ: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20123710-281/google-facebo...

3. Google began requiring police to obtain search warrants for email after the Warshak decision nationally, even though it was binding only in a few states. So did (from memory) Facebook and Microsoft.

4. Google became the first tech company to disclose information about FBI warrantless data acquisition through NSLs in March, and in April became the first tech company to challenge their legality in court: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57572634-83/google-offers-d... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577958-38/google-fights-...

Google is a machine, designed by people. It is true that they have lots and lots of data about individuals, but it is being handled by vast amounts of software and hardware alongside so much other data about so many things about people that there is somewhat of an anonymizing factor. If Google were an individual, what they do would certainly be creepy, but they are not. To put paranoia to rest, it might be in their favor to enact transparent safeguards of some sort that assure consumers that their data is in general not being accessed by Google employees or nefarious third parties (the most notable nefarious third party being, of course, the government).