What was particularly troubling reading these articles was realizing how dependent I have become upon Google. Out of habit, I actually used Google for most of the research that I did to develop this minisite. I kept my Gmail window open the entire time so that I could check my email and use Gchat to ask a classmate a question. I realized that I can’t live without Google. Many people, I suspect, are in this same position. Therefore, how are we to make sure that Google is not able to take advantage of the fact that we are so trusting and store so much of our personal information in one central place? The short answer is that we can’t. However, we can keep an eye on Google privacy policies and how our data is used. Although these policies are self enforced, I think that Google has a fairly good track record of developing consumer friendly privacy policies and sticking to them. Nevertheless, we should keep a particularly keen eye on the China issue. Google was practically accused of collaboration with the Chinese government for creating a “censored” version of Google for the Chinese audience. Supporters claimed that creating a version of the search engine which did not lead people to censored pages made it more convenient while critics claimed that it tightened the Communist regime’s grip on the internet. We will need to keep a close eye to make sure that our central dumping point for data is not compromised or abused.