Fantastic, hopefully it will be enough to thwart the surveillance made mandatory in the UK recently, where ISPs have to keep a record of every website you visit for a year.

You won't be thwarting anything with a Google product.

I'd rather google have my personal browsing history than the UK government.

Yes, with pervasive CCTVs, porn filters, and Five Eyes, the UK has arguably lost your trust and you feel company X (google in your case) more closely aligns with your values, but you must realize that this corporatism is corrosive to democracy.

The government is you in proxy. You can vote out the government. You can sue it in court. You can blog about its abuses. You ARE the government.

And yet, here you are saying that you want some private company which does business with and operates under the jurisdiction of the government to receive and retain all your private data.

This company has no loyalty to you. Your interests are seldom in perfect alignment with its interests. Unless securing your data serves their business interests, they will not fight back if the UK government asks for your data.

You are introducing indirection in your interactions with your own duly elected government and that is going to cost you your voice in the direction the UK is headed.

>>You can vote out the government.

My problem is that in my specific case, I can't. I lived here for 8 years but because I don't have a British passport, I cannot vote this government out. The government here does not represent me or care about me - so the only way I can take care of my own future is by voting with my wallet - and I would rather trust google with my data than the UK government. I do see your general point though.

You are ignoring both minority issues and the fact that many of us are not eligible to vote in our country of residence.

How would transparent proxies prevented?

Proxy would need a cert trusted by the client. Not impossible, but raises the bar.

In an Enterprise or provider-patched device, this is trivial.

Yes, that's true, but I think we have to assume the Enterprise devices are mitm'd. Carrier provided devices are a legitimate threat, I agree