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I disagree with the premise that the large scale systematic privacy violations and surveillance by on the worlds most powerful corporations is the minor threat.

In my opinion, this is the greater threat to our society, and individual criminals compromising individual email accounts is just minor criminal activity, which has always existed in one form or the other.

I believe you mistake immediacy for relevance.

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I think government surveillance is an issue because people can be arrested or harassed for things. I still don't see what harm can come from a private company having my data as long as they don't share it or use it for something nefarious. I don't see the threat of that happening with google.

To be clear these are two very separate issues: government surveillance and privacy policies of corporations.

We agree on the first point and disagree on the second.

If I'm wrong on the second, please give me a plausible example of something google would do with user data that would be actually harmful besides sharing with the government.

Big difference. We are the government and have at least the illusion of changing overreaching government policies (and the recent Obama speech shows that it is at least possible to get them to recognize that).

There is NOTHING we can do to change Google.

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