I'm likely going to use their services in a reduced capacity whether they were complicit or not, simply because this incident has highlighted the risk of compan

I'm likely going to use their services in a reduced capacity whether they were complicit or not, simply because this incident has highlighted the risk of companies who store massive amounts of personal information consolidated together in one place. Even if their only reason for doing so is advertising, I'm less interested in participating in systems that collect and store so much information on me. This probably should've been obvious before (people have certainly been saying similar things for a while), but recent revelations have made me more prone to agree. The problem, of course, is that some Google services are nearly irreplaceable, especially search. There are alternative search engines, but they simply aren't as good for the technical type searches that a programmer needs. Duck Duck Go is better than some older alternatives have been, but when using it I frequently find myself having to return to Google to actually find what I'm looking for. I wish them luck and hope very much they keep improving, as I'd like to use them, but so far I can't really.