I accept your premise but respectfully reject your conclusion. However, my stance might have a lot to do with the way I personally use the internet.
There's a few points here that I make sure I follow:
1. Whatever activity I have online is something that I don't care about others finding out about (similar to not uploading pictures to Facebook that I wouldn't want seen). This is the front page check: anything you wouldn't want on the newspaper cover, you don't do.
2. For things that I DON'T want known, I consider using anonymity tools such as TOR (I've never needed this thus far).
3. For sensitive data, I just don't store it on the internet. If I ABSOLUTELY need to do so, I use client side encryption, such as TrueCrypt. I would recommend doing that if you store sensitive or personal data in dropbox as your example suggests.
We also currently have nothing to suggest that Google will be monitoring the pipes (at least any more than any ISP), so one can assume that Google won't know about anything more than they do now.
Once you realize that most of the data you submit online is used, read and sold by the services you provide it to and accept that fact, you can start seeing your online identity as something precious you don't goof around with. For those reasons, I can't see Google getting any more intrusive in my life than it is now by controlling the pipe: they (or other corporations) already control most of the services I wilfully submit my data to.
At this point, I stop seeing those services (Google, Facebook, etc) as free and instead treat them with caution, while understanding that I pay them in data instead of money. And honestly, I'm kind of fine with this because I use them carefully.
Comments
I accept your premise but respectfully reject your conclusion. However, my stance might have a lot to do with the way I personally use the internet.
There's a few points here that I make sure I follow:
1. Whatever activity I have online is something that I don't care about others finding out about (similar to not uploading pictures to Facebook that I wouldn't want seen). This is the front page check: anything you wouldn't want on the newspaper cover, you don't do.
2. For things that I DON'T want known, I consider using anonymity tools such as TOR (I've never needed this thus far).
3. For sensitive data, I just don't store it on the internet. If I ABSOLUTELY need to do so, I use client side encryption, such as TrueCrypt. I would recommend doing that if you store sensitive or personal data in dropbox as your example suggests.
We also currently have nothing to suggest that Google will be monitoring the pipes (at least any more than any ISP), so one can assume that Google won't know about anything more than they do now.
Once you realize that most of the data you submit online is used, read and sold by the services you provide it to and accept that fact, you can start seeing your online identity as something precious you don't goof around with. For those reasons, I can't see Google getting any more intrusive in my life than it is now by controlling the pipe: they (or other corporations) already control most of the services I wilfully submit my data to.
At this point, I stop seeing those services (Google, Facebook, etc) as free and instead treat them with caution, while understanding that I pay them in data instead of money. And honestly, I'm kind of fine with this because I use them carefully.