I love the Google toolbar!

[curse10]

The new beta has a pop-up blocker. It is MOST excellent. If you use IE I recommend you download this.

[Kellanved]

1. Me too

A must have. I would recommend the non advanced feature version however.
http://toolbar.google.com/index-beta.php

[JohnyCanuck]

2. Just remember you don't get something for nothing.

Every year, Chris Hoofnagle organizes the US Big Brother Awards under the auspices of a public interest group called Privacy International. "These are awards we give out to government institutions and businesses who've done the most to invade our privacy," says Hoofnagle, who also serves as deputy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), another public-interest group concerned with maintaining civil rights on the Internet.

The awards won't be announced until March, but Hoofnagle recently received a nomination that he found particularly worthy of investigation. Representatives of a Web site called Google Watch sent him an e-mail complaining about privacy infringements by none other than the Web's most popular search engine. Basically, the e-mail accused Google of disseminating spyware. Google, the message said, was using its Toolbar application to collect reams of information about the surfing habits of the world's PC users.

<snip>

One of the advanced Toolbar features is a service called PageRank. With this activated, when you visit a Web site, a small PageRank icon in the toolbar gives you a rough indication of how popular the site is. If the site is particularly popular, you'll see a long green line. If not, you'll see a short green line. When this service is turned on, Google keeps a complete record of every Web site you visit. "If you choose to enable the Google Toolbar's advanced features (e.g., viewing the PageRank of web pages)," says the Toolbar privacy policy, "the URLs of the sites you visit will automatically be forwarded to Google." The only way Google can provide the PageRank service is by collecting this information

<snip>

Google strives to uphold the highest level of integrity and respect for our users' information," says Google vice president of Corporate Development, David Drummond. "Google does not share non-aggregate user information with third parties and we treat the integrity and security of user information seriously."

The company does, however, share records of users' surfing habits with people outside the company: "Google may share information about you with advertisers, business partners, sponsors, and other third parties." And, as is the case with any business, the company "will release specific personal information about you if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,904096,00.asp

Not that I'd suspect any DUer would ever, ever surf to any sites that Herr Aschroft would consider subversive or anything like that. But forewarned is forearmed