&gt; The entire premise of the Chromebook is that nothing is stored locally<p>A piece of hardware doesn&#x27;t have a premise. I installed Linux on my Chromebook. Is that wrong?<p>At what point did we stop decoupling software and hardware?<p>I&#x27;ll pass on that notion.<p>&gt; I&#x27;ve seen no evidence of data mining<p>You&#x27;re kidding, right? I promise you, Google is keeping tabs on every byte passing their servers. So is everyone else. Hell, so am I with my servers.<p>&gt; 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.<p>What? Google makes money through advertising. They can&#x27;t advertise if they don&#x27;t know what you like. They only get paid when you click. So yeah, they data mine GMail and all the other Google Apps to know what ads to show you. And they show them on all of their properties.<p>That&#x27;s why there&#x27;s a switch there to stop sharing with other services, etc. and that&#x27;s why they&#x27;re now promising to have that off by default.