@jasonp@... The difference is the business model.
While there is a loss of privacy with any hosted service as you suggest, Google's business model makes it less trustworthy than most others. Google makes all of its money by spying on its users, building a profile, and selling advertising on that basis. And, because of their pervasiveness, it is very hard not to get profiled and stored by Google. Even if you use none of their apps or services, they still link to your IP address from your searches and accumulate those searches to build a profile. On top of that, many sites use other "free" Google services such as google-analytice (this site is amongst those) so they can link your visit to your IP again.
For those fervent users of Google, they have all your emails, your contacts, your calendar, your docs, your whereabouts, your home location, your chats, any soon your television watching habits.
Such an accumulation of data about so many people around the world by one company has got to represent one of the major dangers to society that exists. This is not the Google started by Larry and Sergei to help search for information. This is a company that parasites off all the information produced by others and sells advertising so that you can see the parasited info. This is the Google of Eric, and it is not to be trusted.
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