What I do not quite understand is why people assume that Web is confidential medium to begin with. It is not, and those who somehow believe that it is should readjust their views accordingly ...

If you are trully paranoid, then study the way things work on the Web and use anonimizers, proxies, relays, etc. and hide yourself behind those. Nobody is going to work for you to make sure that you web surfing stays confidential ...

Some companies do cross the line from time to time when they forget TO DISCLOSE that they are collecting information about you, such that even if you wanted to you had no obvious way to find out about what a program or web site are doing.

Yet again, assume that everybody will be collecting info on you, and adjust accordingly. People like to complain a lot about spyware, yet on many occasions they actually do willingly install it themselves. And as disgusting as the spyware is, it often discloses what kind of information it is going to collect.

Going back to the subject, Google achieves the high accuracy of search by *TRACKING* what people find useful. "Is not this outrageous ?!?" some might exclaim. It might be ... Yet I would never want to go back to things like AltaVista which only advantage was speed. I do want to provide Google with the feedback such that next time my search is a little better than before. Consider this as a service to the web community at large.