What can we do to protect ourselves?

The U.S government is asking Google to give up all its data collected on its search engine but Google does not want to follow Yahoo and msn. What can we do to protect our privacy even before search engines get to know everything about us? One of the solutions is to use a service called ‘Tor’. Tor allows users to surf the internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously. It works by transferring traffic three times through random servers, or nodes, on its way from sender to recipient to make it difficult for anyone to trace the data back to its source.
The downside of Tor is that it takes longer to surf the internet as the data has to travel through these random servers but if you are paranoid about your privacy, then click here to check out Tor.