The original story makes little difference. Nor is the quality of the search engine developed of any relevance to the issue raised in this article. The founde

The original story makes little difference. Nor is the quality of the search engine developed of any relevance to the issue raised in this article. The founders originally told us in their 1990's paper for TREC (text retrieval conference) that they were making a search engine to help us avoid advertising. Somewhere along the line, they changed their minds. A database of users was born. This is the fundamental issue. The act of compiling an enormous database of individual users through a massive personal data collection effort, storing it permananently for the purpose of providing online ad services, is useful to certain parties who have the capability or legal authority to obtain this data from Google. The data these parties may want can be just a covert intercept (Snowden revelations) or subpoena away. The data has been, whether intentionally or not, collected and stored for their use, when they need it. This is the consequence of what Google does, vacuuming up all this personal data. The data store exists, Google created it at their own (and our) expense, and history shows third parties will get access to it, whether Google or its users like it or not. The data store is a potential liability for users and an asset for Google, plus those third parties.