Google has quietly rolled out a full blown mobile content reformatter in the style of “Skweezer”:http://www.skweezer.net. Google being Google, naturally it’s better– and, behind the scenes, perhaps scarier from a privacy standpoint.

Here’s what the reformatted eBay looks like; very nice. Notice how they have collapsed lists of links into a single link that can be expanded. Forms are fully supported, unlike the previous, severely limited WAP version.

I got to the reformatted eBay by search for [ebay] on the “XHTML version”:http://google.com/xhmtl of Google search, but you can also get there by constructing an appropriately formatted URL¹.

I have updated Berry 411 and Berry Bloglines to use Google’s service for links to external content.

This is clearly a valuable service and on the balance I think the privacy tradeoff is worth it. But it’s important to be up front about what this mobile proxy enables Google to do– they will have detailed knowledge of users browsing habits. They can trace every site, link and form that you interact with. They won’t tie this information to your personal identity, but they will use it to target advertisements.

It’s important to realize that similar privacy tradeoffs will occur with Google’s wifi network. I believe one of the reasons for Google security client is to enable better tracking of individual users for purposes of targeted advertising– cookies are too easily erased.

Do users really understand these tradeoffs? I doubt it. Will a company that knows almost everything about everyone use this power always for good and not evil?

¹ The format of the URL is simply:

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?q=&hl=en&sky=dmt&u=%s

where %s is the URL encoded URL you want to display.