Google & Yahoo & Big Bro are watching you, your loved ones, your hated ones, and all your/my/our internet queries, research, posts, blogs, sites.....

Censorship in China isn't the only internet issue to be concerned about these days. Hot on the heels of the outing Valerie Plame and our US Government (NSA, FBI, et al) spying on its own citizens (ALL of us you numbnuts, not just the terroristas) is this must-read piece at TruthDig:

In Google, Yahoo, Should We Trust? A Dig Led by Mark Malseed
subtitled: It's time we started asking better questions about our queries.

An unsettling reality has begun to descend on the millions of fans and devotees of the Internet giants Google and Yahoo: They know an awful lot about us.

Every Google search ever typed, every Yahoo news article ever read -- all are logged and stored indefinitely in these companies' massive databases. Think about that for a moment. We whisper a lot into the ears of these shadowy search engines, including plenty of secrets that we'd want to keep from our spouses and kids. And we do so without ever bothering to check what is being done with that information.

If you don't already know, let me be the first to tell you: Google, Yahoo and their less-well-known brethren are keeping tabs on what is being searched, viewed and clicked on, all across their sprawling Web empires. You know all those e-mails you've sent using free services such as Yahoo Mail or Google's Gmail? They are kept for posterity on company servers, even in cases when they have been deleted from users' accounts. And instant messages? A new service from Google leaves a digital record long after the conversations have been forgotten....

Consider for a moment what a complete history of just your Internet searches alone might reveal. Chances are the list would offer pretty good clues as to your political leanings, your health condition, your finances, your job satisfaction, your marital fidelity, your obsessions and addictions, and plenty else that you may want to keep private.

Add to that the full archive of your Web e-mails -- and depending on what other Yahoo or Google services you use, a partial or full record of your Web surfing habits?and these companies have got a fairly comprehensive digital dossier on you, me and several hundred million other people.

Complete article here. Here's an anonymous surfing proxy site in case you want to visit there, or here, or elsewhere incognito.