Certainly between Google Mail, Desktop Search, Analystics, Accelerator, Personalization, etc. Google has tons of info on all of us.

Somehow though (and call me naive) I’m more comfortable with them. On the one hand you have a company with a moto of do no evil (as absurd as it may be) that has been pretty progressive in general and offers you *huge* value as a user in terms of their tools and services and on the other hand you’ve got a known spyware company offering you little more than increasingly relevent ads.

You make a good point and it may not be entirely rational, but I’ll take Google over Claria any day of the week.

Most people use Google as their homepage (voluntarily), many people use Gmail, you yourself use Blogger, desktop search is increasingly popular…the list goes on. Google collects and stores all this information without disclosing what it will do with it – obviously its main source of income is through targetted advertising – which does exactly what the spyware company is trying to do.

I really don’t see the difference, except that Google has first mover advantage and covers up its data collection through cool products and free software. It’s believed that Google maintains over 10,000 servers purely to store data on its users. By linking your emails to your desktop search (which indexes your hard drive) and to your Google searchs, they already have a pretty good portait of most of their users.

Claria claims to no longer be a spyware company…we’ll see how true that turns out to be.