"You're giving a capitalist business the benefit of doubt."
Yes, yes I am.
Even worse, I'm doing the same to most other companies, and persons, as well. As I've said multiple times now that's the difference between skepticism and paranoia. I'll reserve judgment until there's actual proof of any wrongdoing, doing anything else makes little sense to me.
You really shouldn't play the 'capitalism is evil' angle though, I'm a Swedish citizen and quite a solid adherent to many 'socialist' ideas but even with that in mind your argument makes little sense to me. This particular debate has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with fear.
Fear that Google has some hidden agenda and will, at some unknown point in the future, turn into an evil, all-consuming entity that will somehow consume modern civilization whole as a snack on the way towards their nefarious endgame. Whatever that may be.
I don't buy into that.
Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I can't really say, which is the whole point in the end. Being guarded is one thing but this entire debate is looking more and more like frothing-at-the-mouth doomsaying than any justified criticism towards Google.
"Does it not concern you that you are being monitored for 18 months at a time in perpetuity?"
By Google? No, not really.
If it did I could simply choose to have my personal data in the care of Microsoft or Yahoo instead, or just stop using the web entirely.
I'm a lot more concerned about the everyday invasion of privacy I can do little about. Cameras everywhere, airports wanting to use fingerprint scanners rather than IDs, state-sanctioned data traffic monitoring etc.
It's my choice to allow Google to use my personal data in exchange for services rendered. You may very well argue it's a poor choice and one that will come back and bite me though. Maybe you're even right about that, who's to say? On the grand scale of things, even as far as privacy concerns go, it's certainly not something that keep me up at night though.
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