Regarding this whole discussion about Google being scary, I agree, to an extent, that they've got a whole lot of people (and eventually many more) totally hooked on their free services -- what would be do if they started charging for them?

But realistically, the nature of the web (for the moment, at least) is that free equivalents pop up to almost any equivalent paid service. I've got a MobileMe account (because I get it free from work) but can (and do) duplicate all of its services for free, since I'm not going to get it free forever, and sure as hell won't pay for it. There will always be another free webmail provider, another search engine, etc (or at least there will be if Google does something that turns people off to them and creates the demand -- for the moment they're positioned to be the sole big player in those, despite Yahoo's and Microsoft's attempts to regain their shares).

The other point to remember is that they've managed to get obscenely rich off of pretty subtle, easy-to-ignore ads that are (gasp!) actually relevant enough that I'd bet all of us, ad-proof as we all are, have clicked on one at least once. They've got no incentive to do anything that'll piss users off as long as there's tons of money to be made providing excellent services for free that enough people use to make the ads worthwhile.

For the moment, I think we've got little to fear from Google, though I could see over-zealous datamining becoming a problem.

Oh well, I use a G1, so all my personal data are belong to them anyway.