I've always wondered whether Google ever digs into communications in a situation where they're trying to decide whether to acquire a company. It seems like reading a company's email would be a reliable source of information about whether they're on a genuine trajectory or whether e.g. they're having trouble with their investors. I've never looked into whether it'd be illegal for them to do so. Surely in the EU it would be illegal, because privacy protection seems to be a serious concern there, but I don't know about the US.<p>If you use Google Talk, every conversation you've ever had will be recorded and indexed and tied back to you. If you use gmail, same deal. Even your drafts of unsent emails will be. If you use AIM, same deal: every conversation you've ever had on it will certainly be logged somewhere and tied back to you. Yada yada, same deal for almost every chat program, because almost every chat program has no clientside encryption. If it does, it's not very popular, or it's hard enough to use to where people will think you're paranoid if you ask them to go out of their way to "download this chat program that lets us talk without anyone logging it."<p>I think the endgame here is to watch what you say. It's safest to assume every text conversation is public. How many of us have said something in text to our families or friends that we'd be extremely uncomfortable saying publicly? It's a little unsettling.<p>Then again, hopefully when the TextSecure people ship their browser-based chat program things will improve somewhat, because you'll be able to talk to someone else without the conversation being duly noted. (There will probably still be metadata that ties you to the fact that you're talking to someone, but at least the content will be protected.) Hopefully it will be easy to use... I wonder if they need any help in that capacity.