Being one of the advocates of leaving: The article got it wrong for me, on various points.
First: No, Google is not evil. Nor good, for what it's worth. It's a random company that won a lot of sympathy in the past and became unavoidable (for better or worse) on the internet.
If someone cries that Google is turning mad, evil and creepy, go ahead with posts like this. If people start thinking about the implications of throwing every piece of their online identity into one corporations data center: Stop mocking that.
Yes, you can have less secure solutions. Yeah, email isn't a secure protocol to begin with and pgp/gpg is mostly dead by now, used only by geeks that line up to compare their fingerprints and passports, calling that a 'party' (Hey, I did that. I'm allowed to make fun of my own subculture).
That's totally missing the point. For some people it is just too scary to give email, calendar, news feed, instant messages, mobile operating system, 'office' aka text editor/spread sheet data, pictures, location data (latitude), travel data (maps, google tracks) and probably a lot I missed to a _single legal entity_.
We didn't even touch the 'use Google as openid provider' part here, which puts your 3rd party accounts in Google's hands.
I wouldn't entrust those details to my wife or brother and recently, without fearmongering or throwing my hands in the air and running in circles, decided that Google is not the right place for that level of access either.
If you mock that, if you call that paranoia, then you're insulting intelligent people making a conscious (and - private/intimate. Even if discussed in public) decision. The headline of this article alone is out of line.
First: No, Google is not evil. Nor good, for what it's worth. It's a random company that won a lot of sympathy in the past and became unavoidable (for better or worse) on the internet.
If someone cries that Google is turning mad, evil and creepy, go ahead with posts like this. If people start thinking about the implications of throwing every piece of their online identity into one corporations data center: Stop mocking that.
Yes, you can have less secure solutions. Yeah, email isn't a secure protocol to begin with and pgp/gpg is mostly dead by now, used only by geeks that line up to compare their fingerprints and passports, calling that a 'party' (Hey, I did that. I'm allowed to make fun of my own subculture).
That's totally missing the point. For some people it is just too scary to give email, calendar, news feed, instant messages, mobile operating system, 'office' aka text editor/spread sheet data, pictures, location data (latitude), travel data (maps, google tracks) and probably a lot I missed to a _single legal entity_.
We didn't even touch the 'use Google as openid provider' part here, which puts your 3rd party accounts in Google's hands.
I wouldn't entrust those details to my wife or brother and recently, without fearmongering or throwing my hands in the air and running in circles, decided that Google is not the right place for that level of access either.
If you mock that, if you call that paranoia, then you're insulting intelligent people making a conscious (and - private/intimate. Even if discussed in public) decision. The headline of this article alone is out of line.