I don't view Google as either evil or benevolent. I view them as a corporation that acts in its own self-interest (as you'd expect). They do a lot of good thing

I don't view Google as either evil or benevolent. I view them as a corporation that acts in its own self-interest (as you'd expect). They do a lot of good things for the tech community such as releasing open source code. However, I often avoid their products because they are not open about what they track and record. That doesn't matter to many people, including many people in the tech community, but it matters to me. Google arguably tracks online activity more than any other company. They propbably know more about your online behaviour than you do yourself. They have made tracking appear to be a perfectly reasonable and normal thing to do. They even have an OS (ChromeOS) that tracks everything you do from the apps you use to the web pages you visit, to even the documents you print (all routed through Google's cloud print service, even if your printer is sitting next to your ChromeBook). This isn't even done anonymously given that you have to sign in to use these services (you can't use a ChromeBook without signing in, using it as a guest limits what you can do). How many people would be happy to sign in to MacOS, Windows, Linux and know that everything they were doing was being recorded and tracked? Meanwhile, the tech community just gives Google the easiest ride possible on such matters. I don't believe Google does anything remotely sinister with the data it collects. But it is a staggering amount of data that they capture. And if you read their lengthy privacy policy, it's notable how little it tells you. How is my data aggregated? Who sees it inside Google? How is it anonymised (if indeed it is - no mention of this in their privacy policy). Some of Google's services ask for very personal info: date of birth, mobile phone number. It's reasonable to want to know what Google uses this data for. Is is really just for security and verification? If they cared about privacy, they'd actually tell you. Their statements about privacy are always framed in terms of security. Yes, privacy is not possible without security, but security does not equal privacy. To me Google's attitude is summed up thus: we'll do everything to keep yoru data secure but we won't stop tracking you to death.