A few years ago when I was in California I spent a fun afternoon at the sci-fi writer and physicist David Brin's house - he had a Java related business idea that we were talking about. Anyway, he has an interesting take on privacy: reduced privacy is OK if everyone gets the same power of "surveillance" (hopefully, I am paraphrasing him OK on this). I thought about David's take on privacy when playing with Google's new beta (of course :-) personal search tonight: you login with your Google account and it remembers your search queries, what links you follow, etc. This is all searchable and convenient so I think that I am going to use it frequently in the future. Since nothing you do on the internet is really private without taking some effort, I just accept that. Now, in practice, only software agents are likely to be monitoring what we do on the web, whether it is Google, Yahoo, or one of dozens (or more!) companies that make our business their business. US, UK, e