If I may ask... why? What is the damage to you besides a handwavy "it freaks me out" type of statement? You are going to a free website. If these website owners have collectively figured out that showing you these particular ads is the best way to generate money from the free experience they are providing, why do you feel they should be forbidden from doing so?

Why are our elected officials spending any time on this? Is there *any* evidence that the data collected has ever been misused in any way? The online advertising industry is based on selectively targetting users with advertisements, and so far I see no compelling reasons for the government to interfere. Before the government starts regulating an industry, shouldn't there be evidence that the industry is in fact in need of regulating? Disclaimer: I work in an advertising company developing the conversion rate models

Actually, I don't think this was a 20% project. Chrome had a team of engineers working on it, and at its core it has the V8 Javascript engine. You don't just wake up one day and say "Hey, why don't I write an optimized Javascript engine from scratch!" This is a project that fits in with Google's strategic vision, and it had the necessary manpower allocated to it.