Google can (and does) change its terms without notice.
It's modestly better about this than many other SaaS / PaaS providers, but not by much.
I'm having a conversation at this moment with the chief architect of G+ over the G+/YouTube Anschluss in which the two services were integrated. I had separate accounts on each prior to this, repeatedly refused to combine accounts, and yet found them combined as of last November.
Worse: individual users have little or no recourse against such actions.
As for Gmail, as has been pointed out, parties not using Google directly have their private correspondence entered into Google's systems. And not just when emailing Gmail addresses, but many domains for which email is handled via Gmail.
Similar arguments could be made for many other online service providers as well. I don't consider Google to be significantly different from many of these, either for better or worse. But they're certainly a massive and major part of the problem, particularly for their size and scope.
Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen have made this point quite well, particularly in their December, 2013 Columbia Law School talk, and Schneier's April, 2014, Stanford Law School lecture.
It's modestly better about this than many other SaaS / PaaS providers, but not by much.
I'm having a conversation at this moment with the chief architect of G+ over the G+/YouTube Anschluss in which the two services were integrated. I had separate accounts on each prior to this, repeatedly refused to combine accounts, and yet found them combined as of last November.
Worse: individual users have little or no recourse against such actions.
As for Gmail, as has been pointed out, parties not using Google directly have their private correspondence entered into Google's systems. And not just when emailing Gmail addresses, but many domains for which email is handled via Gmail.
Similar arguments could be made for many other online service providers as well. I don't consider Google to be significantly different from many of these, either for better or worse. But they're certainly a massive and major part of the problem, particularly for their size and scope.
Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen have made this point quite well, particularly in their December, 2013 Columbia Law School talk, and Schneier's April, 2014, Stanford Law School lecture.
Maciej Cegłowski, "The Internet with a Human Face", makes the case far better yet. http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm