A blast from the Internet past on Chrome...

A name I haven't heard in a while: Richard Stallman, one of those guys without whom none of the current giants of Internet industry would currently exist. He warns against putting all your data in the cloud, as Google wants you to do with its ChromeOS:

"Now he says he is increasingly concerned about the release by Google of its ChromeOS operating system, which is based on GNU/Linux and designed to store the minimum possible data locally. Instead it relies on a data connection to link to Google's 'cloud' of servers, which are at unknown locations, to store documents and other information.
"The risks include loss of legal rights to data if it is stored on a company's machine's rather than your own, Stallman points out: 'In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant.'
"The accountability of cloud computing providers has come under close focus in the past fortnight after Amazon removed Wikileaks content from its EC2 cloud computing service, saying that the leaks site had breached its terms and conditions, and without offering any mediation in the dispute."

Note 1: Stallman was the driving force behind GNU; and, as the quote above notes, ChromeOS is based on GNU.
Note 2: It seems like the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently won a case, US v Warshak, in which the court determined that the government needs a search warrant to get access to your email if it's on an email provider's machines. Of course, government being what it is and the law being what it is, don't rely on the law to protect your email from the government.