If you're a Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) user, you probably enjoy the relatively high quality of the company's products at t cost of -- zero. How does Google give all this away for free, you ask? It's the same as any other company on the web that features quality products at no cost. The cost is your privacy. You are paying, and paying big.

Do you mind? It's hard to say what kind of personal, financial and psychological profile Google has on millions of its customers, but you can believe that this massive marketing database exists. How Google manages this will be the most important decision in the company's young, decade-old existence, but the question remains: do many of us sell our souls for freebies? Every time you sign up for something free but fill out a complete demographic profile to get it, you're selling out. Google is doing nothing different -- but its scale is so huge that all this data controlled by one entity does cause for concern among the informed consumer inside us all. It should, anyway.

Google, like anyone in business who is savvy, knows that giving away products or services for "free" on the front end is made up for on the back end. In other words, would you rather pay for every single product or service you use and not have any entity know how to market to you -- or would you rather get a good majority of your products and services at no cost but with the attached condition that there are many entities out there that know you better than you know yourself?

More importantly, they know how to push your exact buttons to have you behaving like a robotic consumer or a slot machine junkie? With the U.S. consumer responsible for two-thirds of economic activity (as little as that is at the moment), the harnessing of this kind of power becomes clear. Okay, I'm off to perform a Google search...

As Doug McIntyre wrote, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) looks to finally start erasing all that information the company's servers log each time we perform that web search. After 18 to 24 months of performing a Google search, the company will make the last part of IP addresses anonymous. As a result, the traceable info Google captures from home PCs, work PCs, public PCs and cellphones (anywhere you can perform a Google search) will now become more anonymous.

As Doug noted, why is Google keeping the information at all, then? Most likely, Google wants to have computer-identifiable (if not personally-identifiable) information for law enforcement agencies for a while in case a subpoena comes up. The way law enforcement cases deal with online traceability, things will come up long before 18 months in most cases. Why, then, not anonymize the entire IP address of web searchers? What good will obfuscating the partial IP address of each web accomplish? It should be all or nothing, yes?

Since Google maintains these search logs forever right now, what will it do with all the search data already logged? Who knows, but at least Google users will have a little bit of privacy when conducting those searches, well, after 18 to 24 months. What I find interesting is this quote from Richard M. Smith, an Internet security and privacy consultant at Boston Software Forensics. Smith concluded that "Google should not be in the spy business ... by logging IP addresses and search strings they are running the largest intelligence operation in the world."