Just a couple points...

> However I do avoid many of their other services as I am not overly keen on having any of my data stored on the servers of a company who thinks its mission is summed up by "do no evil" and therefore can do anything it likes.

A couple points to illustrate that privacy and openness is not just a lip service at Google.

1) It is a _requirement_ for _any_ project inside google that deals with user data to provide a way to extract that data in some open and well-known format. Think about it: you _can_ download all your mail via POP, you _can_ export all your documents to ODF, PDF, RTF or DOC, you _can_ export your calendar to (something, i forgot what exactly). Your data is _never_ held hostage to Google, and that's no coincidence - it's a design requirement.

2) Re: privacy, for example, GMail is not allowed to learn from spam false-positives that you explicitly marked as not spam because this message is clearly private and not a single part of it is allowed to be stored anywhere except your inbox. Google does care about privacy. A lot.

There's really no way for big that is in the business of "organising the world's information" to avoid being thinked of as "they have all this information, they MUST be doing something illegal with it". It's must something in the human nature... But so far Google impressed me with how thorough and, in a good sense, paranoid are they about their users privacy, security and, yes, freedom.

3) Re: opensource. You'd be surprised, but there's actually not a hell of a lot of opensource code being used to run google services. Linux is a well known piece of it, and yes, Google is one of the biggest users _and_ contributors to Linux kernel. MySQL is another, and the code for modifications has recently been released. In genral, contributions back to FLOSS is encouraged, if only to ease future maintenance. But most of the code for stuff you interact with is developed in house and is either constitutes what is google's competetive advantage over others (search technology, cluster infrastructure parts) or heavily dependent on them and would be useless without them.