I published some thoughts here about a trade-off I see playing out between productivity and privacy.
It's unfortunate, but it seems that a service provider's choice for preserving your privacy, often leads to a situation where they cannot leverage your data to offer you a better experience.
Search, which hinges on the ability to scan and index your files, is a canonical example.
It seems clear there's a trade-off, what's less clear is: how big of a deal is it? Have you experienced any trade offs in productivity by opting for a privacy-preserving workflow?
Of course, search can all run locally on one's own devices. I believe that there are also privacy-preserving search techniques which can run remotely, albeit often with an unacceptable overhead.
Frankly, I would rather have local indexing and search anyway: it is significantly faster, and I am likelier to have more spare resources to dedicate to myself than Google is to have to dedicate for my use. What I mean by that latter point is that while Google are huge (1.18T right now), they must spread their resources over many, many users (that number divided by the number of people on earth — a decent first approximation for their number of users) is only $155, and I have way more than $155 to invest in my infrastructure.
