How Google will continue its watch over you

… how quickly they type in that information when making purchases, which accounts they use to pay for goods and what items are purchased, giving the company a broad overview of a particular customer's purchasing habits.

Google has struggled to gain marketshare on PayPal, which has offered a similar web payment system since the late 1990s. However, one area where PayPal has not ventured is the desktop. Google could imbed Checkout into the Chrome OS, allowing users to make payments from it or purchase applications in a similar way as Apple has done with the iPhone and its App Store.

Google Maps/Location

Google Maps and its related location-based services are one of the highest areas of interest for privacy advocates. Google Maps' Street View service provides 3D, street-level imagery of streets, with camera-equipped vans taking photos of people and buildings worldwide.

The service can also locate where users are by obtaining information about what Wi-Fi routers or mobile phones they use to connect to the web. This may be a standard part of the Chrome OS SDK, allowing applications that run on it to determine a user's location. Many mobile applications already do this, including Evernote, which tags where each user note is created.

What to expect

Layers of data sharing
It is safe to assume that there will be many built-in ways to share some — or all — of your personal information with Google. Where the company's approach may differ from its other web products is that it will be able to obtain a far broader sense of what you do from its own properties — and even when you're offline.

Google typically has an all-or-nothing approach when it comes to what types of personal data it can harvest. When it comes to operating systems, however, more of that information is localised, so Google may offer a way to select certain parts of your application library or hard disk that cannot be indexed or tracked in a similar fashion to what it does with its browser.

Lots of toggles
To manage all these security and privacy options in one place, it is likely that there will be an extensive settings panel to allow users to track what they are and are not sharing. Google may go so far as to make this more transparent with some sort of taskbar that lets you change it on-the-fly, like it has done with its privacy mode in the Chrome browser.

Tracking and reporting system
One of the most exciting (or potentially creepy) parts of Chrome will be Google's approach to tracking how users interact with the OS. The company spends considerable time and resources on tracking user experience on its sites, both with extended betas and internal research studies. Having the same kind of tracking system embedded in the OS will give Google a simple way of seeing what works and what does not.

As such, Google is likely to take a more extensive approach than Microsoft, which has a more limited system for tracking user activity on Windows. Users can opt in to a 'customer experience improvement program' for Office, while Windows users can send information to Microsoft when applications or the entire OS crashes. Google could go so far as keeping track of how long you leave your machine running or what times of day you use certain applications in order to create battery-saving hardware profiles.

More details about the Chrome OS, including privacy and licensing information, are likely to be unveiled when Google makes the code available as open source.