I’ve got a ton of respect for Google. They do an amazing job with search. Products like Google Maps make my jaw drop. It’s innovative, works exceptionally well and does things that many wouldn’t think you could do in a web browser without client-side software. Their stock, GOOG, has certainly performed well thus far. I think they have a great approach to technology. They push the envelope!

The Google Web Accelerator is one of the newer products from Google Labs and it frankly concerns me. The pitch for the product is to save you time on your web browsing, sounds great right? Well, to do this you assign Google as your proxy server and then funnel all of your web requests through them. They compress things, prefetch things and do a number of other tricks to make browsing faster. This sounds great right?

Well, take note that everything you do in your web browser goes through Google. They say they are not using this information in any way, but I simply wouldn’t trust any company with that much information. The allure is just too much to resist. Google could track every thing you ever look at on any website. They can track how much time you look at each page. They could even take the opportunity to alter the content from the publisher before it gets to you.

Actions like this on the part of Google make the Googlezon story sound more and more realistic. Add to this products like the My Search History from Google and you see a real cauldron of privacy issues starting to boil at Google.