You should be taking issue with the governments demanding the records rather than expecting these companies to break the law on your behalf.

Don't focus on what nouns different parts of the spying apparatus choose to label themselves with, or what other functions they serve. Instead, consider their effects in the context of being a spying apparatus.

That's a really diluted standard for "spying".

The spies that saying warns of were not crawling around in vents with night vision goggles, they were your friends, neighbors, and coworkers who would relay semi-public information to a processing center that used the info towards harmful ends.

I see this situation as a direct analogue. We communicate naturally with a supposedly disinterested or trustworthy party, who then collects that information and distributes it to others, without our best interests in mind.

That being said, thinking they shouldn't be in a particular country which obligates them to do these things is a much more sound position than just saying they shouldn't follow the law in a few particular cases.

Ultimately, if you know they are operating in a country with a government which likes to do these sorts of things, caveat utilitor. (At least, try not to look so surprised when the police come knocking.)

And because of that I choose to use a 1-man search engine, without loss of quality, while gaining everything last bit of privacy.

And because of this, his stunt of a billboard ad is actually truthful.

The billboard is just noise and you are technically sophisticated enough to know better.

[citation needed]

"An Indian man is facing five years in jail for making an "offensive" comment [against Sonya Ghandi] after Google handed his personal data to local police."

http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2217063/google-handing-user-...

Yahoo taken to task over China

http://www.boycottyahoo.com/yahoo_taken_to_task_over_china.h...

The personal data that is handed over is email address of the account. It's probably a privacy violation if it's really that hard to find out someone's email address once you know his social network account, but it's not spying on people.

Google's Orkut social networking site

Here is the same story on TechCrunch showing how Google provided more than just an email address:

The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/18/hit-pause-on-the-evil-butto...

That makes it even less sensible to call Google "spying" on people when one signup for Google's social network.