Comment by eball

You make it sound as if Google is being altruistic here. Security is essential to the direction they are heavily pushing.

Chromebooks vs. Macs/Windows/Linux

Gmail vs. Exchange(not Exchange Online)

Google Apps/Drive vs. Office/LibreOffice

"Why the NSA loves Google’s Chromebook"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/why-th...

Of course, all this applies to all cloudhosted services including Skydrive, Exchange Online, etc. but out of all companies, Google is the one that has most at stake if people become fearful of their data leaking on the way to the cloud and decide to keep their data inhouse instead of going to the cloud.

To me, the big surprise was that Google wasn't encrypting the links between it's own datacenters before these revelations.

As usual, Stallman is proven right again. If your data is under someone else's control, it's not yours.

"Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.comp...