"Are you wor­ried about Google (or Face­book or Twit­ter or your tele­phone com­pa­ny or Mi­crosoft or Ama­zon) mis­us­ing the da­ta they col­lec­t? That’s per­fect­ly rea­son­able. And it’s al­so a pol­i­cy prob­lem, noth­ing to do with tech­nol­o­gy; the so­lu­tions lie in the do­mains of pol­i­tics and law."

Political and legal solutions are effectively intractable; any technological path which leads to a requirement for one ought to be abandoned. The answer is not to make laws forbidding big corporations from doing bad things with our data (like that's going to stop them!) but to make technology such that we can conveniently avoid giving them any data to begin with.

The author maintains that Google is a "highly-centralized or­ga­ni­za­tion". From the "How Google works" book I got a completely different impression. Could someone elaborate on how Google is centralized?

From the "based in a part of the world that I don’t much like" and "Bay Area" part of that comment, I think he means geographically.

is it intentional to use a light-grey font? I found it much harder to read.