We are probably the last generation to have a choice when it comes to what a computer knows about us. And we'll also probably be the last to care, or to be at all aware. We will always have to balance convenience versus trust. Is it convenient to have a reliable email service with which to conduct the majority of my personal affairs? Certainly. Can I trust that a corporate entity will never use my correspondence and recorded behaviors for nefarious means, no matter the price, or politics, or ethics/morality of its employees? No. But the risk, for me, has yet to outweigh the reward, so on Gmail I remain.

We haven't seen a company like Google before. We also haven't seen one fail. Or be split apart. Or be compromised on the scale of the recent Target intrusion. Google is smart. But they cannot be perfect.

I'm sure people at Google also take great care to make sure data doesn't disappear. Things we store in the Google services will be around for a long, long time. Let's say in 20 years, GoogleGlaxoSmithKline decommissions its original data centers by throwing its old platter drives in a dumpster. They only used pre-quanta encryption algorithms, which can be broken in constant time by performing the break in the higher-plane universes. How many passwords did I email to myself? How many accounts are still active? How much compromising information is still valid? How much incriminating information?

However inconvenient, the choice to avoid something like Google is the choice to deal in impossibilities rather than improbabilities. There will always be inherent risk in storing sensitive information in a computer. For some, it's a step too far to transmit it to somebody else's computer.