Many users seem committed to the company, even when they are skeptical of its reach. Firger, the law student, acknowledged feeling a “weird tension” about his love of Google’s products and his fear about its omnipresence in his life.
“I don’t know if I want all my personal information saved on this massive server in Mountain View, but it is so much of an improvement on how life was before, I can’t help it,” he said.
Toni Carreiro, a Web designer in San Rafael, California, and a self-described Google addict, said that the elegant simplicity of Google’s design is a blank slate upon which she can impose her own personality: It’s not there to sell you on anything, just to help you, while other sites, she said, are full of blinking ads and clutter.
“They have all this animation going,” she said. “I just want my stuff. That’s what Google gives you — ‘me.’”
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