It's like saying "People would never break into a bank, when they could break into someone's house and steal their stuff"

It may be easier to break into someone's home-brew system, but generally it would be unlikely to happen unless you were being otherwise targetted. Whereas google has a lot of users data, which could make it a more attractive target.

Just how "home-brew" are we talking here? If there's any web-facing code that you didn't write yourself, whether commercial or open-source or whatever, that's a target for attackers that just scan everything looking for known vulnerable services.

If it is entirely custom, I'm fairly sure there are a few classes of common security errors that can be reasonably well tested for without direct human involvement. Which brings back the threat of attackers just scanning for all available targets.

If you're a "person of interest", you'll be attacked either way.

If you're just a regular person, like me, you won't likely be targeted. But my chances of getting a collateral damage are much higher in a centralized system: when it's broken into, my data have a chance of being siphoned off along with data of someone less ordinary, who was the target of the attack.

But there's a third case: "normal boring people" become interesting just by being together in a big group, even if no particular "person of interest" is among them.

The odds of someone physically taking my computer and decrypting my data are zero (128-bit encryption for the win!).

The odds of someone electronically breaking into my computer are higher.

The odds of my data being misused or misaccessed at Google are one: it will happen.