Earlier this week, I was reading an article about Trip Advisor, which has been one of my go-to sites for travel info (“What’s wrong at Tripadvisor?“). I’ve contributed dozens of reviews over the years, so have had an investment in the site.

It seems Tripadvisor has been in a slump for a while, with its stock price plummeting from $110 per share down below $30.

When Expedia spun it out in 2011, Tripadvisor was the undisputed king of hotel reviews and research with great reach in organic search — that is, until Google Travel tilted consumer traffic in its own direction and competitors such as Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb closed the gap.

Can I confess that I’ve never run into Google Travel before? Booking.com and Expedia, yes, but Google Travel, nope.

So I thought that I would take a look, and headed off to www.google.com/travel/.

And that was a shock!

At the top of the page are two large graphics, portraying the trip we are on now, and another planned future trip. Both include a link to “View Details”.

And that brought another surprise. Google displayed our United Airlines flights complete with confirmation code, and our hotel with complete reservation confirmation info.

And that wasn’t the end. Scroll down a bit and there was a nicely illustrated list of each of our past trips going back five years to February 2015. As in the case of future trips, most of the past trips include flight, hotel, and rental car details.

There is a note in small print near the top of the first page: “Only you can see this.” You know, I don’t think that’s very comforting.

Click on a link for further information, and you learn something else from Google: “Your trips are created from confirmation emails sent to your Gmail or your recent activity.”

Hmmmmmm. That’s a lot more mucking around in my Gmail than I was aware Google has been doing. I’m pretty open about such things, and tend not to get paranoid about privacy issues. But this demonstration of how intrusive they can be does give me pause.