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Instead of storing private documents, family photos or a music collection on your computer at home, Google will do this for you. The information will be held on one of Google’s servers, in amongst its huge farms of supercomputers, that take up spaces the size of football pitches, that the company has built across the globe.

It means that wherever you are, you can get hold of the same things that you were working on at home, provided you have an internet connection. All you need is a portal, something that can run the internet, and not much more than a screen and keyboard. Fat, desktop PCs will be a thing of the past.

The idea raises the same issues of privacy that have dogged Google in the past, and campaigners worry that it will give the company unprecedented access over people’s personal information.

“Once information disappears into Google, no-one knows what happens to it,” said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International. “Google has to grow up. It is acting as an adolescent. If Google wants world domination, it needs to act in an adult way and needs to develop transparency.”

But Google says that it is always careful about protecting people’s privacy. A spokesperson said: “We’re transparent about the data we collect, and we design products that give people control over the information they share.”

A good example of this tension is Google Street View, a mapping service where you can see street-level photographs of a given area; an obviously useful service for anyone who has got lost gazing at a map. The service is expected to be rolled out in Britain later this year.

However, within hours of it being launched in the US, photographs of downtown San Francisco and New York hit the internet. Bloggers posted images of people from the service, their faces visible, being arrested, sunbathing and urinating in public. Google seems to have learned its lesson, with faces and number plates now completely blurred in Street View, and other safeguards firmly in place.

Many of Google’s brightest ideas come from the attempt to fulfil its almost hopelessly ambitious mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Upcoming projects will go some way to achieving this goal. Amongst them is Google Book Search. For the past few years, Google have been scanning the pages of books in order to eventually release them online and make them fully searchable.

The theory is that you could type “Harry Potter” into Google, and J.K. Rowling’s novels could appear on your screen, ready to be read. It means that people will be able to access millions of titles online, even ones that are now out-of-print, and many for free.

To this end, Google secured one of the biggest publishing deals of all time, reaching a $125 million settlement with American authors and copyright holders, allowing them to launch the service including titles within copyright. At the time, writers seemed happy with a deal that secured them cash but made their work more available to more people. Booksellers worried whether Google’s move would drive them out of business.

“We don’t own or create content – we help people to find it,” said a Google spokesperson. “It’s then up to the owner whether to offer it for nothing or charge for it.”

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