Ah, the "you have a choice" argument.
Absolutely. You have a choice. I have a choice. I used my choice. I razed my Google account to the ground and scorched the earth over it several years ago, because I was fortunate enough to discover just how completely abusive our relationships with Google actually are.
The problem is that most people do not have that fortune. The problem is that Google is a billion dollar monopolist industrial player, with an enormous public relations and marketing budget, and the power to cause itself to be perceived as a big friendly giant. At I/O recently, it literally paid for favourable coverage with free hardware given out to all of the "tech journalists" who attended. And the result was 50+ articles on the main tech blogs all frenziedly discovering how wonderful Google was. There was a complete absence of a critical perspective.
Most people are not fortunate enough to know how dangerous it is to put your whole life into a foreign corporation's servers sitting on the other side of the planet. They do not realize that the consequence of a whole society doing this is to create the incentives for a less free society. And they do not realize that the moment they become "interesting" - such as if they become an activist - all of this technology becomes a weapon against them.
Given that they do not realize that - as I once didn't - they sign up for these services. They are given a false impression of how safe they are. They have a choice - yes - but they do not have all of the necessary information to make that choice in an informed manner. Google gives them that choice under false pretenses. And after several years of using it, if they do become aware of it, it is much harder to leave. They feel, "ah, it's too late now, I have to live with it." When it is not and never is too late.
The "they have a choice" argument you make is as about as nuanced as the theory that everyone in a "free market" is a "rational actor." Yeah, in no-space. Not in the real world. And that's why people get screwed. Assange's argument - and I agree with him - is that we are all getting screwed by Google. The fact that that royal screwing is the consequence of a symbolic choice made under false pretenses is not really a forceful counterargument.
>I also think people are too fixated on Google, when VISA/Mastercard, your Bank, your phone carrier, and your ISP have much longer, more comprehensive, and detailed records on your behavior that the police can, and have, been monitoring far longer and with less oversight.
For any one of those examples, it is false to say "more comprehensive and detailed" I think. These industries gather information on you in order to do their business. Google's business IS gathering information on you. When you take into account content, social graph, IP access logs, search history, browsing history, and all of the other stuff that Google voraciously gobbles up - which is increasing - any one of those industrial players is dwarfed in terms of the data it takes.
Taken all together, yes, they give a very detailed picture of you. That's the point. And everyone should be aware of it, and Google is a primary culprit.
It's also worth pointing out that Google very likely will attempt to replace each of those industrial players with a service of its own, and in some cases already has.
>Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto is not about perfection, it is a value, a gradient, that you strive for.
It's a marketing slogan. It is also phrased in the imperative. I have wondered more than once - as evil after evil is discovered being perpetrated by Google - whether it is Google's memo to itself, or Google's message to the world.
Google's real name policy was evil. Google's aspirations to "tame" the internet is evil. Google's evangelizing political correctness is evil. Google's mission directive of gathering all information is evil.
I don't care if each crop of comp sci students fresh out of university waltzes wide eyed through Google campus telling itself it'd blow the whistle on any evil it saw. I don't trust those people to know evil if they see it. When you consider how completely banal people like Sergei Brin's conception of evil is:
"[Google Glass] are, uh, a new form of computing, uh, that’s designed to really free you."
...it is possible to have a lot of sympathy with the title of Assange's essay.