Google is no longer just a search engine, but a service provider (email, documents, checkout, domain management), and each of these services require varying degrees of your personal information. Gmail for example requires your cell phone number (for verification), and obviously has your email address; while checkout requires your address and bank account information.

What non-technologists might not realize, is that all of these services use the same cookie that google collects whenever you perform a search query. Therefore, this seemingly harmless cookie google mentions, can actually be used to link your search queries to all of the other personal information google knows about you whenever you perform a query on a machine where you have also been logged in to one of google’s myriad of other services. For some perspective, see http://google.com/searchhistory

I’m not trying to imply that google has devious motives for linking all this information together; in fact, by being able to do so, they are able to provide a personally tailored service, with more relevant search results.

I do however think that this thinly veiled disclosure on the information that google collects when you perform a search query can be misleading when viewed in two narrow of a context.

And such data is at high risk of being intercepted without judicial review. The 9th Circuit ruling in U.S. v. Forrester says there’s no 4th Amendment protection for email to/from fields or web URLs, even though this is in the packet data payload, not the packet headers. Customer traffic containing such data can be intercepted at the ISP and supplied to law enforcement without a court order.