Honestly, I used to trust Google a lot. Then things like the NSA leaks happen, and other questionable Google changes, and I&#x27;m sorry, but I lost that trust. I use as little closed-source stuff as possible now.<p>I&#x27;m sure it is frustrating, but you&#x27;d have to thank the people in charge for that distrust. I wasn&#x27;t born with it, the cloud-providers earned it. I used to think this was tin-hat territory myself.<p>IMO, the solution is to stop storing things in the cloud, and start giving me the tools to do it myself. I have no idea how to work that out financially. If google made a &quot;maps app&quot; that was open-source and I could run on my own server, but charged for it, I would probably buy that because I like the service so much. But as it stands, I try to avoid using it as much as possible, because I simply <i>can&#x27;t</i> trust Google.<p>EDIT: Forgot to answer this<p>&gt; if the primary effect of the conspiracy theorists is to throw bricks at the people who are trying really hard to make sure the bad things never happen, then which side are the conspiracy theorists really on?<p>At the end of the day, Google just doesn&#x27;t do enough to make me think that they are &quot;making sure the bad things never happen&quot;. I&#x27;m sure there are a lot of people who are trying hard to make that true, but how can I know that is true for everyone? What can you offer me other than root access to your servers? I&#x27;d honestly like a good answer to this, because I just don&#x27;t have one.<p>And the amount of data&#x2F;power that Google has is just too much for me to think that they won&#x27;t &quot;get greedy&quot; some day. If up until today, Google was a good company and wasn&#x27;t abusing anything in any way, and suddenly tomorrow they turned evil, why would they erase my data first? They still have it, and I have no control over whether or not Tomorrow-Google will keep it.<p>&gt; ...then which side are the conspiracy theorists really on?<p>The side of trying to validate whether or not things are as they say on face-value. Whether thats Google&#x27;s side or not is up to them.