[ken]

That's exactly what makes me nervous. Even someone working at Google isn't entirely sure what user data is or isn't sent to other parts of the company for other uses.

Plenty of other tech companies have lied, changed their policies, or just plain screwed up. Privacy and security are hard, and everybody has their hands out. As a consumer, there's no way for me to verify anything.

As Woz said (sort of), "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." When I make a backup to an external FW disk on my desk, or sync my phone with my computer over a USB cable, I know exactly what data is going where. The whole point of The Cloud being a cloud is that we don't know what's happening in it. It's inherent to the architecture. "Trust but verify" minus the "verify".