> Google, the institution, just has not to be evil, as they have defined evil. That there's obvious internal disquet about their new direction should be fairly disqueting to you.

Could you point me to the obvious internal disquiet? Is this in reference to Larry Page's supposed "ultimatum"? Because I was under the impression that that was a simple expression of his commitment to his vision for the company, misrepresented by a hostile media entity.

It seems to me that the bulk of your objection boils down to Google's continued and expanding collection of personal data, and an impending but vaguely characterized misuse of that data.

> That's part of the problem, I don't think anyone does really. We're in uncharted territory and part of the reason it's so tricky is so much can be inferred about you from seemingly innocuous data, or from analysing your social graph.

I generally find warnings about vague, ill-defined threats to be unconvincing.

> Once they have the data and it's been mined for further meaning, it's inevitable they'll find new uses for it.

This does not seem at all self-evident to me.

In fact, it seems to me that Google's incentives are such that it's pretty much in their interest to use the data well. They have no incentive to sell it, since it allows them to target search results and ads better. And they have every incentive to keep their users' trust. And as far as I can tell, they've taken the issue pretty seriously. The Google Buzz disclosure incident is the only accidental exposure of information I can remember, and they handled it pretty well.