There are very good reasons why we, as a society, have agreed to disallow many activities that are physically possible. There's a good case to be made that such a rule should be explicitly added where organizations are entrusted with private data.
But that's not the world we currently live in.
The only thing that sets a limit on what google can do with your data is the amount of data you give them. They also have terms of service and privacy policies but these can change over time and/or be re-interpreted in creative new ways to enable whatever it is they want to do next.
However, there is a normative side to the debate as well. This is what I (and you in your first line) explicitly referred to. This side is about asking what state of the world is desirable. It is perfectly legitimate and good to ask this question, so that we might hopefully act upon the answer once it has been found. That is how progress is made in the world.
The perfect example to illustrate this is actually what waterlesscloud wrote downthread:
> If I leave some loose hairs on an airline seat, does the airline now own my dna?
Do you own your DNA? What the hell would that even mean?
Yes. Intellectual property, clean and simple. If someone can make a buck off my DNA, then I get my cut. Prevents exploitation such as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
"Neither Lacks nor her family gave her physician permission to harvest the cells. At that time, permission was neither required nor customarily sought. The cells were later commercialized. In the 1980s, family medical records were published without family consent. This issue and Mrs. Lacks' situation was brought up in the Supreme Court of California case of Moore v. Regents of the University of California. On July 9, 1990, the court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized."
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
Also you call developing a vaccine to cure Polio an exploitation? As far as I can tell from cursory reading of that article, this "exploitation" was hugely beneficial to society.
Which explains why so many people were reluctant to acknowledge the source.
If you don't like that reality then don't use their service. It really is that simple.
I don't like the reality of the US War Machine killing innocents simply to enrich crony war profiteers. By your reasoning, I should stop paying taxes too.
You can. Depending on how principled you are about thing like this. You'd still need to give up your American citizenship otherwise it doesn't matter where you live on the planet.
You're basically saying I shouldn't expect any sort of fair treatment or rights from any service provider on the Internet. I don't want to play on your Internet.
It's modestly better about this than many other SaaS / PaaS providers, but not by much.
I'm having a conversation at this moment with the chief architect of G+ over the G+/YouTube Anschluss in which the two services were integrated. I had separate accounts on each prior to this, repeatedly refused to combine accounts, and yet found them combined as of last November.
Worse: individual users have little or no recourse against such actions.
As for Gmail, as has been pointed out, parties not using Google directly have their private correspondence entered into Google's systems. And not just when emailing Gmail addresses, but many domains for which email is handled via Gmail.
Similar arguments could be made for many other online service providers as well. I don't consider Google to be significantly different from many of these, either for better or worse. But they're certainly a massive and major part of the problem, particularly for their size and scope.
Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen have made this point quite well, particularly in their December, 2013 Columbia Law School talk, and Schneier's April, 2014, Stanford Law School lecture.
Maciej Cegłowski, "The Internet with a Human Face", makes the case far better yet. http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm