Its rather obvious why people are worried. It would be like having a lion in a cage with a deer. Sure maybe the lion isn&#x27;t interested in eating because its full, or maybe it never intends to eat the deer because it gotten used to other kind of meat. Or maybe it gave its word that it wont. All that is possible. But instead of having to spend every second of your life watching if the lion eats the deer, we should structure the system so that its impossible for the lion to ever be next to the deer.<p>Google is an advertising company, and slowly they have been adding spyware-like capabilities to their product (address bar - keystroke logging in chrome, injecting every single search result with javascript, &quot;accidentally&quot; listening to users microphones for hotwords without their express permission, etc) 
It is perfectly natural to be very weary of such companies. I suspect people would be fine with Google providing the chromebooks as long as the contract legally binds them to never collect the data.<p>&gt;Unsubstantiated claims are also called conspiracy theories.<p>No, they are not. Conspiracy theories have a connotation of being ridiculous and outlandish. That is how the general public understands the term. A company like Google whose bread and butter is datamining, being accused of mining additional data is not a conspiracy theory.