Michal Glowacki wrote:
I don't rate my ability to secure my machine better than Google. What I do rate higher is my low-key profile. Of course, everyone can be a victim of a hacker, let it be a 13-year-old kid who's just bored or a professional hacker looking for something to sell. But let's face it, what are the odds of you personally being a victim of a seriously motivated hacker? And what are the odds of Google being that victim? Just by being Google they are prone to being attacked 10000 more often.
This essentially boils down to "there's safety in numbers". I think the argument ends up being the same whether you mean "there's lots of personal computers on the Internet: what's the chance of it beng my specific 'low profile' computer that the serious hacker targets" and "there's petabytes of data on Google's servers: if Google were hacked, what's the likelihood that it'll be specifically my 'low profile' data that the Chinese government/hacker decide to steal?".
Michal Glowacki wrote:
Also, another argument: of course servers now are getting better and better. But what if someone really switches off the servers for having a bad hair day and you urgently need access to your cloud? I don't think I'd like to give up that remaining control (or illusion of it) I have.
Well, it could always happen, but the odds are probably no worse than the odds of you getting a severe power outage/network outage/other things you can't control with your local machine.