[pathseeker]

>Even if that's the case then that's not a privacy violation, no human ever can see how that's associated with a specific identity

How can no human see the data that Google has? Google is not a magical place where machines cannot be compromised.

>To my knowledge there has never been a hack of Google's data or any leak connecting any user's identity to PII.

The Snowden leaks say otherwise. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...

>This is ridiculous FUD, you're not compromising anybody's privacy by letting google drive do an OCR for you.

So it depends on your threat model. If you care about rogue Google employees or other actors with 0-day exploits, then putting information into the hands of Google is a risk.

[jimmaswell]

OK, that's the NSA, you can assume they know everything already. And in this case, the article mentions Yahoo, which is where the information was in the first place.

[syntheticnature]

Indeed! The discussion is about rogue elements getting a Buddy List that was in AOL's hands, and therefore one should assume the TLAs already had it. Google might not have, unless you, or all your contacts, used the AIM/Google talk integration that existed for a bit, in which case they had it. Leaving aside that it's quite likely these connections already leave a Google-based data trail.