When it comes to trusting others with your personal freedom, there is a confusion between the needs for privacy and anonymity. You need the first much less than the second.
What about trusting third parties with your (or your companies) data? When the computers you run your applications on are owned by someone else and located beyond sight, surely there is cause for concern. But the belief in an inherent risk with cloud computing is mainly a marketing strategy for companies (like Microsoft) who came late to utility computing. In reality, third parties deal with their customers valuable assets everyday. One assumes that those still in business do it properly.
Trust problems are twofold between your data and a third party; trust as in "they don't care like I do" and trust as in "they may betray my interests".
The idea that "they" cannot be trusted is not a concept you often hear aired about other vital public networks:
- We run our own power supply here, in case they try to cut us off or reduce our current.
- We collect and filter our own water in case they cut off our supply or taint it somehow. Or it comes out of the tap too slowly.
- We don't use the public phone system - they might be listening. We only use satellite phones.
There is a well known medical condition for anyone using the arguments above without good reason.
Of course, I don't "trust" my electricity supplier in a personal sense. But thanks to capitalism, I know the workers at the power plant have kids. And these parents will not be able to afford to send their kids to the right school if they displease customers too regularly. So annoying me may well lead, inexorably, to little Johnny coming home from his bad school crying, because his head was flushed down the toilet again.
And that I do trust.
Hospitals have their own backup generators, which seems to imply that when its important, you can't trust a public network. In reality, a hospital is not going to have the skills and understanding to maintain a reliable fallback. A lone generator gathering dust in the basement is a costly way to ward off a small risk. For most of us, a sensible fallback is knowing how to find candles and matches in the dark - until the power is restored.
While a power cut maybe the equivalent of losing your data, there is no simple equivalent to your data getting into the wrong hands. But most industrial espionage does not involve high tech skulduggery - just smooth talking on the golf course. Or looking at trash.
Google have a lot of information about me, surely they can abuse this? But Google don't know - or care - who "I" am, and this gets us back to the cloak of anonymity. Google holds massively valuable trend information about how groups move. What an audience search for after a commercial break is worth millions. Compare that to the value of knowing what porn site a minor celebrity browsed - maybe a newspaper exclusive? And for that, the risk of destroying a search providers credibility irreparably overnight. Not good value.
But of course, if the third party is under pressure from your own government, then it is somewhat different. With market defying nonsense like the War on Terror, for example, anonymity is ripped up regularly. Once this happens, any network can be perverted from a transport mechanism for information or materials to a jail system. An outward eye turned inwards, with links turned to restraints.
If you don't trust your service provider, change them. You don't have to use Google. But if you can't trust your rulers, then all decisions - business or personal - are in any case compromised.
Apart from the tax opportunity, representative governments usually end up steering clear of direct interference with network utilities. But as a new network appears, the government is often forced to act as arbiter, planner or wet nurse. Even as the first rail routes were laid, there were fears that it was dangerous for people, especially women, to move at high speeds. (And yes, maybe this does explain Network Rail delays today.)
Perhaps, to be generous, the current government need to protect us all from Internet pirates is just one of these early glitches. Meanwhile, only advocacy, tactical voting or revolution can really stop a government pushing any public network down the pan.


