I would respect the announcement more if they just came out and said it - "we need cash to keep running and Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data. Sorry folks."
> This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP addresses as potentially identifying metadata. No profiling will be performed, and no data will be shared with third parties.
So it seems they aren't selling it directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if aggregated numbers could be used for sales deals. (Hi Bing, we have 137M "travel" searches a month, I'm sure that you could put some big juicy ads next to those if you purchase the default search engine status)
Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?
Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?
I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.
