Well, what you're saying makes perfect sense - if you want your stuff to stay private, you don't rely on someone else to store it and transfer it, regardless of how secure they might say they are. That applies to everything, be it email or your grandmother's broach in a deposit box at the bank. Whenever you depend on someone else to take care of something, you have to trust them.

The only thing that bugs me is how people somehow find Google less trustworthy than, let's say, Microsoft. Normally I wouldn't care about some random person's delusional paranoia, except that all of this google-is-creepy nonsense is actually getting gmail addresses blacklisted because people don't want to send email to a gmail account and have it stored forever. gmail is so good it is actually tempting me to switch away from Apple's Mail, even though OmniWeb is my primary browser so I have to launch Safari just to access it. I don't want an email service I like so much to become unusable because some sheeple don't do research.