There have been several things recently that disturbed me about Google. At first I had just thought it was all benign, that they had free tools that were relatively easy to use. But now I'm beginning to question all that. Here's a few reasons:

- The episode of BBC's Virtual Revolution entitled "The cost of free", which showed how Google uses basically all the information it gathers on its users that is used to target advertising at them - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qx4vy. What was really shocking was the fact that they scan your email and advertise at you based on what you write in them.

- The invasive nature of Google Buzz, that is well exemplified by the Blog post by fugitivus "Fuck You Google", that described how buzz had inadvertently gave sensitive information to an abusive former partner.

- How the new google chrome operating system will actually do away with hard-drives and store "ALL" your files on Google's cloud servers.

I never really thought though the implications before but it's become clearer to me that while Google may have the best intentions with keeping this information private, they are becoming far too dominate. They say they only keep the data for certain periods of time, but I just don't buy that won't change in the future. When hasn't "absolute power corrupted absolutely"?

Or am I just being paranoid for no good reason?