My view on Google and the whole “Google controls my data, I’m going to cry” mentality that people seem to be adopting in recent years is this: Google are not pushing their services on you, you have a choice to use them or not (go buy Microsoft desktop software and store everything locally like I did and wait for your hard drive to go corrupt and lose everything, then learn as I did never to put all your eggs in one basket).

If you do choose to use a service like gmail, you understand that it’s free and you could get screwed at any minute. If any of my gmail services were disabled, or I started getting calls from some business offering me some “special deal” that seemed strangely relevant to my email data, sure I’d be pissed off and would never use them again, BUT I’d understand that it was a choice (risk) to trust my data on a server that was not under my direct control, nor behind my firewalls.

So for the privacy w**kers out there complaining about “Google has the power, therefore they are evil”, maybe take a minute to realise everyone has a choice to use such software. If someone is stupid enough to “lose everything”, then at least they’ve learned a valuable lesson about a little thing called “backups”. (Ask any Uni student who had to transfer data via floppy drives back in the day, you quickly learn about viruses, corruption, backups and recovery)

As for businesses worrying about Google etc (let’s called them the overlords) selling their data, read the terms and conditions. Don’t put your data anywhere you don’t trust it. If that means you pay more than those who blindly trust the overlords, well at least you’ll be able to sleep at night not worrying about these things.

Just my 2 cents …