Why the hell would I use a platform purposefully made so that Google can datamine the living shit out of my personal interactions with all my friends and family and spam me with ads while I am talking to them so they can sell me ads to the highest bidder and make more money? It's the equivalents of pigs saying "Wow this slaughter house is so cool, they have free food and it's so comfortable! I think I'm going to stay here!". No thank you. I will keep using Signal and Telegram. Anyone who cares about these gimmicky features is a retard.

All my computers and smartphones have full disk encryption enabled. I don't want thieves to have the ability to play with my data. How is that not a perfectly legitimate use? I travel frequently and if my phone or laptop was stolen, without encryption, a thief could extract all the data, steal my identity and make my life a living hell. Also currently in Canada when you cross the border you can have your devices confiscated. If the agents want to inspect them and are unable to they will then be sent to Ottawa, where the border services will attempt to forensically extract data from the drive to look for "evidence". When you're at the border your protections against unreasonable searches are no more. Suppose I go to a tropical country and the border agents want to inspect the devices of every single man who comes back out to look for evidence allowing them to catch pedophiles who engaged in child sexual tourism. They will not find anything about you, but they will surely find some material somewhere that could be constructed as damaging. Or suppose you visited 4chan and on it where was a lolicon avatar that was loaded without your knowledge and it is still in your browser cache, it could be potentially illegal in your legislature. There are many ways where this can backfire against you. This is why I fully encrypt and wipe my devices before crossing the border and I advise everyone to do the same. We have so little privacy in this world, you can bet I will use encryption to protect my private life from prying eyes. These prosecutors can plead and gesticule all they want, however the genie is not getting back into the bottle.

They load by default and I don't know how to disable them. Another undesirable "feature" creeping in. Why am I not surprised that with every new update, I find myself thinking what they will have screwed up this time?

Great analogy. When I see the Slashdot libertarians, always adamant that Google's results must not be tampered with in any way even when it deprives innocent individuals of living their life in peace for no good reason, I wonder if they would be so steadfast if by some whim of circumstance their name was associated to something humiliating or nasty in Google and they couldn't find any employment due to it.

I use Sandboxie with run restrictions for my browser, so it protects me from system changes, and no other programs can be started even in a worst case scenario. I use Opera and use the click to play function so that plug-ins only start when I authorize them. I also use Kaspersky because I got a copy for $10. Kaspersky used to be really bloated, but with the version 2013 I'm surprised at how light it is, I don't notice any performance hit. Kaspersky usually ranks among the highest, and seems to have fared well in all of these tests consistently over the years.

Unfortunately, development for it has been abandoned for a while, and a good chunk of the time, the SSL notaries will be down, leading to tons of false warnings about invalid certificates.

It can still be a cause for concern. Even if your IP is not transmitted to Amazon, Amazon receives a text string they were never meant to have, which may contain very personal information that could be tied to you in and of itself.

Why are some people saying that there is no noticeable performance difference? I have used it on my Thinkpad with a Core 2 Duo from 2011 (AES to get the fastest performance) and with a hard drive it slows down all the time, making me believe that my computer is 7-8 years older. It slows down so bad when looking at a Flash video that it is practically unusable. When I use a SSD it is much better but there can still be very big problems. If I have to scan or decompress a file that's too big, most of the time the whole system will freeze. For a corporation that deals with extremely sensitive information this is fundamental. Else, it has benefits I'm sure, but it's a total pain.

Is it accessible to ordinary individuals? Would it be possible to use something like Cyanogen or some apps to completely prevent any data from your Android phone being sent to evil Google?