Did you guys see the picture re-uncovered this week of Sergey dressed in drag.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg
from that url are a lot more inside secrets! Burning Man 97 & stoned!
They even joked about their ipo back in 98 in a party invitation I read. just join their cs349 newsgroup still online since 98, read the archives you'll see it.
I like this article, think you should read it if your into google:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/google_mail_is_evil_privacy/
Here is an excerpt:
But it isn't so much Google searching email that has caused the anxiety from privacy watchdogs this week, as the company's confused retention policy. What will Google do with that data? Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie.
"Once users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if it chose to," Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum told the Los Angeles Times. "And if Google ever compared the two sets of data there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed." Richard Smith, formerly at the Privacy Foundation pointed out that "Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together."
Rather than allay these fears, Google's accident-prone co-founder Larry Page refused to rule out a future policy of 'joining the dots'. A simple "No, Never" would have prevented much of the damage. But asked if Google planned to link Gmail users to their Web search queries, Page replied:
"It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out."
Google's Gmail privacy policy points out that your email will be retained even after you close your account -