This post was published 2 years 5 months 27 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.

There is no hiding the truth that if you’re a faithful Google user, you understand to some degree that your online activities are monitored by a larger force (heh). Google offers great services, great results, and uses both to collect (data mine) activities to make further "improvements". The fact is, your search engine queries are closely monitored by Google. If you’re curious to know why, Google explains the reasoning behind logged search activity on the Google Blog.

• Improve our services: Search companies like Google are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search services. Analyzing logs data is an important tool to help our engineers refine search quality and build helpful new services.
• Maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse: It is standard among Internet companies to retain server logs with IP addresses as one of an array of tools to protect the system from security attacks.
• Comply with legal obligations to retain data: Search companies like Google are also subject to laws that sometimes conflict with data protection regulations, like data retention for law enforcement purposes

How much and how long personal data from individual searches can be held is a different question which creeps into privacy and data protection issues. I for one don’t mind the fact that Google feels the need to mine my queries. Where do you stand on topic of Google, privacy, security, and internet monitoring?