Google knows I am writing about them this week.

They know that I have been searching their index for information on "Google talk" and "Google sidebar" and "Google privacy policy", so they could probably tell that I am interested in their new tools and how they furnish them with even more personal data on even more people.

Of course nobody at Google is actually sitting there trawling through the search logs for my computer's IP address and then linking that address to frequent logons to "billthom@gmail.com".

Nobody has spotted that the same IP address was used to connect to the Google Talk service a couple of times on the day of its launch, using that same Gmail account.

If anything, their data centre will have noticed a correlation between people searching for "Google talk" and Gmail users signing up, but that is hardly surprising.

So saying that "Google knows" anything about me is really just the sort of shoddy journalistic shorthand that gets readers worried about what they are up to even though there is no evidence they have done anything untoward.

Full Story.

In other google news: Porn publisher sues Google in image row