Google Watch is a website run by Public Interest Research, started in 2001 by Daniel Brandt. Ostensibly its goals are to report on conflicts of interest in Google's corporate structure, the dependency of the public on it for information, invasion of privacy issues, and its increasing commercial links with private interests. However, its critics charge that it is merely the work of a disgruntled website owner whose websites' Google PageRanks were not to his liking.
From Google Watch website:
"The privacy struggle, which includes both the old issue of consumer protection and this new issue of government surveillance, means that the question of how Google treats the data it collects from users becomes critical. Given that Google is so central to the web, whatever attitude it takes toward privacy has massive implications for the rest of the web in general, and for other search engines in particular."
