cool

Par-i-noid. Dude, all your lifes details already belongs to someone, somewhere. Just get over it. Make it easy and put it all in the same place.

No. Not paranoid - I have experience in that department, I know what paranoid is.

And, guess what? I don't have a Gmail account. I continually tell you no when you ask why I don't just hand over wikinewsie.org to Google and bask in the glow of perpetual monitoring, cataloguing, and market analysis by Google. I have good reason to, and the Chinese efforts to hack Google accounts are a very good example why you should engage your brain and try and take control of who knows what about you.

Certainly, the majority of details about my life are in various databases; but that's the point - various databases, owned and operated by different organisations which don't all cooperate. Thowing everything into Google is putting all your eggs in one basket and introducing a single-point-of-failure. If someone wants every single gory detail of my life history I intend for it to be costly and time-consuming for them to get it.

That's not paranoia - it's common sense.

I give out my details to Google. I opt out of things on their privacy settings console, but I have no problem with things like this as long as the personally-identifiable data isn't used willy-nilly.

That said, not everything to do with me is on the Internet. A Google search will reveal some, but only if you look hard.

I'm not too worried about Google themselves misusing my data, I'd certainly trust them more on security than the UK government for example. But the tight integration with email worries me: this blog post points out a big problem for privacy (i.e. you will automatically be publicly connected with people you email frequently).