"Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time." - Edward Felten

Your one-liner is kak, care to explain it a bit better? My point was that security holes have been considered features by many for years. A lot of time in security is devoted to securing new technologies and features. Additionally, users and the corporations whose interest is served by punching the hole are not the people to aim for the middle ground; the corporation is greedy and the user is dumb (when it comes to security decisions). Being a feature, however, is not enough to justify or eliminate privacy concerns. Finally, even if it was, of the 8 or so changes, only three of them actually disable a feature; the suggest feature, alternate error pages and the updater. The only useful one of those is the updater, and it is implemented so badly that it isn't worth keeping. I'd rather use Secunia's Personal Software Inspector.

Google's not my girlfriend and I certainly don't want to give her keys to my house. The fact that Google has managed to force you to make that decision and 'bias your use case' in such an extreme manner is part of the problem. At worst, I would like Google to have keys to the garden shed. Well, let me clarify one thing; if a burglar picks the lock on your front door, that's an attack, not a security hole (or vulnerability). The fact that your lock can be picked is the security hole, and the ease with which it can be done, and the criticality of the assets it protects provide the severity of the vulnerability and impact. Just so we can use a common lexicon :) Likewise, Google (and other's) mass collection of data can be considered the vulnerability, and their malicious intentions the attack. The vulnerability can still exist without a malicious threat agent, the likelihood of it being exploited is just limited. Thus, even if Google isn't evil, they are still poking holes.