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To tell you the PageRank of a site, Google needed to know what site you were visiting. The Toolbar sent that data back to Google if you let it, and Google would show you the green bar. The key was "if you let it," because you could also download a version of the toolbar that would not send any data back to Google. The user could make the choice, though Larry and the engineering team believed—and hoped—that most people wouldn't pass up the advanced features just because Google might learn their surfing habits. We're talking free extra data here. While knowing the PageRank of a page might have only nominal value to users, knowing the sites users visited would be tremendously valuable to Google. The PageRank indicator provided a justification for gathering it.

I thought it was an enormous privacy tradeoff. I knew we planned to anonymize the data and wouldn't match the list of visited sites to a user's identity. Still, it felt creepy to me and I figured I wouldn't be the only one. So how to inform users without scaring them off?

If we said that turning on advanced features showed Google every web page a user visited, many people would never download any version of the software. That would be a disaster. The Toolbar was a secret weapon in our war against Microsoft. By embedding the Toolbar in the browser, Google opened another front in the battle for unfiltered access to users. Bill Gates wanted complete control over the PC experience, and rumors abounded that the next version of Windows would incorporate a search box right on the desktop. We needed to make sure Google's search box didn't become an obsolete relic. To do that, we would turn Microsoft's strength to our advantage and pit one group within the Redmond-based company against another.

If the Google toolbar became so popular that people downloaded Internet Explorer just to run it, then the browser gang within Microsoft might defend us when the Windows mafia inevitably tried to snuff us out. In the meantime, we would piggyback on the world's most popular web browser to gain millions of users.

The wording users saw when downloading the Google toolbar had to be subtle and assuage their concerns while downplaying the risks. We could just bury it in the EULA (end user licensing agreement) in tiny type and no one would be the wiser. Almost nobody reads the legalese terms of use before installing software. Knowing that, I considered long and hard and came up with an appropriately nuanced response—the two lines I referred to earlier.

"PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY," I wrote on the first line in large bold red letters. On a separate line beneath it, also red and bolded, came the words "IT'S NOT THE USUAL YADA YADA." The text that followed was equally subtle: "By using the Advanced Features version of the Google toolbar, you may be sending information about the sites you visit to Google."

That seemed to cover it.

Maybe I had been drinking the Google Kool-Aid too long, but I believed that telling our users explicitly what we were up to and giving them the power to decide if they wanted to play along was the right thing to do. I didn't want to leave the information lying about where they might stumble across it—I wanted to set it as tablets before their eyes, scribed in burning letters a hundred feet high.

There was a less altruistic reason as well. I thought we could forestall future criticism and distrust if we were forthright about our actions. That would spare me, as the person responsible for user communication, a great deal of pain.

Yes, I expected we would scare off some potential users, but those who did sign up would completely understand the tradeoff they were making. I believed the value of the Toolbar would become so obvious to them that they would evangelize to others. Eventually even those who had been hesitant at first would become convinced.

Bay, our UI guru, worried the language would frighten away too many users unnecessarily, though he didn't insist we change it.