On my way to work this morning, I noticed Google had made front page news of a UK national newspaper The Independent, with a headline of "Google Is Watching You". It's not every day a search engine makes national news, and certainly less often that it makes the front page, so I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about.

The root of this article is all the data that is being stored for Google's increasingly prevalent "personalised search" and the looming buyout of DoubleClick, a company that that use cookies to track internet behaviour and target adverts that are tailored from this information.

It appears that some Data protection agencies are concerned about all this information that is being stored in the Google database, and other observers appear concerned about Google locking internet users into its services, with iGoogle, Gmail and YouTube, where this tracked information can be attributed to a name and address and not just an IP address which is subject to change.

I suspect that Google's intentions for this information fall short of the Orwellian Big Brother criticisms that are being aimed at it in this article.

However, Google's main way of making money is as an advertising platform, so there can be little doubt that this information is likely to be used to try and sell you products.

Google are attributed with a quote in this article of "You can make money without doing evil," that is said to be a mantra for the company. However as it grows and evolves further into a larger corporate beast,it will be interesting to see if this mantra remains true.