The entire premise of the Chromebook is that nothing is stored locally and you&#x27;re almost exclusively using web services. That&#x27;s how they&#x27;re expected to work. You can&#x27;t use one without knowing that your data isn&#x27;t stored on that specific machine because in many cases you can&#x27;t even access your data without an internet connection.<p>I&#x27;ve seen no evidence of data mining - I can&#x27;t even think of a use for this data, much less a use that would be worth the risk considering their growing popularity and how well Office in schools worked out for Microsoft. I imagine just them using Gmail and Google apps is far more valuable than any fruitless advertising to people that can&#x27;t spend money.