Gmail provides me with a free email service. They already have the full text of all my emails. If they want to use that data to help decide what ads to serve me, I have no problem with that so long as that data isn't shared with anyone else without my consent.
I think its fair for you to accept the terms, if you know what you're getting in return. The problem here is that you will never know exactly what information is stored about you, and how personal it is, and you have zero control over it. Also simply by sending YOU an email, I'm also entangled in the data collection scheme.
On the contrary. I know what emails are stored in my inbox just as well as Google does. I can also search through that information and delete it if I so choose, so I do have control over it.
They also have a lot more information about you than just your email, especially if you use their search.
Do you have any way of verifying this? I am not accusing google of anything, I just find this to be an interesting level of trust to have with a free online service.
In the absence of any evidence that they _are_ sharing my private information with others, I see no reason not to trust them in this regard.
Really? Good luck suing them if they decide to sell your data. They certainly won't lose much revenue from fleeing customers if they think up a creative new way to monetize your data with "select business partners"; Google (and Facebook et al) spent the last decade entrenching themselves infrastructure for far too many people. They have far too much power and inertia to lose much in the short or medium term.
> trust them
Privacy policies change. Even if Google has good intentions about protecting your data today, you're gambling that those intentions will not change in the future. You don't know who will be hired/fired at Google in the future, nor do you know how the current (or any) management will react should the company have a particularly unfortunate run of bad finances or other troubles. Never-mind that humans often act irrationally for stupid reasons so any prediction about future behavior has to have a huge error bar.
However, that isn't the big problem with trusting Google to not share your pattern-of-life[1] with a 3rd party: you're assuming it will be Google's choice, or that they will even have any de facto influence over the long-term fate of your personal information. Your trust doesn't make Google infallible; the best security teams can only make hacks less likely. Warrants, legislation, and quasi-legal-but-hard-to-ignore orders from governments happen. Prism (and other mass surveillance programs) still exist. Concentrating valuable data at one location makes it more valuable, so the scope of potential threats to your data increases as more data is collected.
The world is not as just[2]. Trusting that your data will magically stay safe at Google forever - or even just the near future - is only possible if you first pretend that Googles security is and always will be perfect, that the programs Snowden/Drake/Binney/etc warned us about never existed, that no current or future Google employee will ever become disgruntled (or crazy), and probably many more potential threats that haven't been invented yet.
[1] or mundane data like your email
I don't think that's true. Sure, they wouldn't be out of business overnight, but depending on how serious this hypothetical breach of trust is, it'd certainly hurt them a lot.
> Warrants, legislation, and quasi-legal-but-hard-to-ignore orders from governments happen
My threat model does not currently include the NSA or the US government. I don't anticipate that changing in the near future, but if it does then you're right; I'll certainly need to stop using Google services. (And probably all cloud services in general.) Or at least "air gap" them from the portions of data I want to keep secret.
> pretend that Googles security is and always will be perfect [...] that no current or future Google employee will ever become disgruntled
While I consider myself to be more security conscious than the average citizen, I _still_ trust Google's security practices (against both internal and external threats) far more than I trust my own. If my data on Google's services gets compromised, I think it's far more likely that it'll be because someone stole my password and 2FA tokens than because somebody hacked Google.
As with anything, I realize there's certainly a security/usability tradeoff to be made. For the moment though I'm quite confident that the extra utility Google provides is worth the risk, at least for my purposes.
That just seems silly
I didn't even say not to trust google, I just questioned the level of trust.
It's a common phenomenon across a variety of social media when a certain few companies are questioned on their practices.
It's all very tribal.
Google has already secretly given people's info away. They've admitted to getting and complying with NSL's already.