diberry - 2:59 pm on Oct 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

@Reno, I see where you're coming from, and you're right about the coziness on that level. I was thinking more of just search/Adsense, which I think the govt *could* slap without compromising Google's other govt activities... and why is Google into those activities, if not for profit? But the bottom line is: there's nothing WE can do.

Except what I've done over the past year:

--Replaced Gmail with another web-based provider that doesn't have a search engine (and has a privacy policy protecting me from them)
--Replaced Analytics with a paid stats program
--Replaced Feedburner with FeedBlitz for email lists (which actually asks people why they're unsubbing, which helps me tailor my news lists to build them, which is protection if G ever dumps me)
--Never used Adsense much, but removed it from the few little undeveloped sites that still had it
--Unverified all my sites in WMT, am not sure what else I can do to remove that info.
--I still use Google Affiliate Manager because I can't really replace this one item one of their stores sells. The minute they stop carrying it, I'm so out of there.
--Use other search engines for my own browsing, except to check certain keywords at times, which I do through a browser I use for nothing else + a proxy.
--Clear my cookies immediately as soon as I log out of any of my Google accounts that I still use for Aff Mgr, AdSense (only because you must have an AdSense acct to use Aff Mgr, and YouTube). Meaning, I'm only ever logged in briefly, and the cookies are there for maybe a couple of minutes.

I'm sure G will hold on forever to its records of what sites I own, but they'll have no way of knowing if I've sold some or all of them. From now on, they'll get nothing except through their bot. Or close to it - I've done all I know to do.

That is one practical thing we can do.