Dear Google,

It’s been a year of ups and downs. There were some great Google Doodles, such as the one above for Sally Ride's 64th birthday (she was the first woman in space), as well as this recent interactive one celebrating Beethoven's 245th year:

You made history this past year with your innovations in driverless cars, robot dogs, and the development of a contact lens which measures blood-sugar levels in the tears of diabetics.

It was also the year that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, filed a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission against you for collecting user data from school-aged children. 

But it’s hard to stay mad at you – when I lost my phone I used your Android Device Manager to lock it with a stronger password and erase my data but more importantly, it let me write cheeky comments to the person who found it. Why don’t more Android users know about it? Was that your plan all along – to give me something to talk to my relatives about during the holidays? 

You are one of the unelected arbiters of the world’s information. As per above, your reach into our lives has increased and you've made strides to offer users better control of their privacy. You also deal with a lot of unique problems, like 2 million copyright claims every day. A lot of people respect you and some people are scared of you:

As the year comes to a close, you're still on everyone's mind. You fight spam for us and sometimes you're just plain weird and try to write our Gmail reply for us too. We look forward to what you'll have to show us in 2016.