I trust Google much as I trust the sun. I believe it’ll keep doing its thing, and that this will probably overall be beneficial. I’m glad there’s a sun. But the problem with the sun is that it doesn’t give a crap about me. If I have a problem I’m going to have a helluva time contacting the sun’s customer support people, and they’re not going to be well incentivised to take care of my problem if I do.

Perhaps that analogy had got away from me a little, but the point is: I like having a bank with branches where I can go in and talk to a person if I ever really have a serious problem. I feel confident that the bank isn’t going to accidentally swallow all my money and then become uncontactable, whereas I tend to worry that about big tech companies.

Really? Wells Fargo isn't mining my search history using a black-box algorithm to decide without transparency whether to close my account or decline a transaction because I might have become a risk of some sort.

Not that they would ever do such a thing.

You literally just described fraud protection, which is something most banks nowadays use. It might be opt-out (or even opt-in) but that's very much a thing that banks do, and they get plenty of false positives with it.

I'd rather have my bank abruptly close my account for opaque reasons than fraudulently open additional accounts in my name.

Why not both? With Wells Fargo you can have it all!

Well...latter is illegal and the former isn't (usually) so I think there's a bit of apples-to-oranges, but yeah you got me, as we've seen being a regulated institution isn't a guarantee of good behavior. I still think the incentive, opportunity and the inclination of Google to not act in my interest is pretty high.