The patent I described in my post is from Yahoo rather than Google, but regardless of that, there are a lot of sites that are gathering information about people in ways that wasn’t done before. People share things about themselves that they might not have a few years ago, and those things are out there for potential employers, and acquaintances as well as people who might take advantage of information that people share about themselves.

I’m not sure if the Web is transforming the way that we think about privacy, but I think it’s changing.

Google does have people talking about privacy these days, with the release of Google Buzz, and the fact that it’s tied so closely to people’s Gmail accounts, and automatically adds contacts based upon people that you emailed and chatted with, which can become public if you’re not careful.

Google does potentially collect a lot more information than that from us, from our searching and browsing behaviors on the Web, our use of Google services, and possible, like Yahoo’s patent filing here describes, the footprints that we leave on the Web in many places.

Honestly, I’d rather see ads that are relevant for what I’m searching for, or looking at, at the moment rather than a guess as to what my interests might be.