The purpose of a firewall is to establish a positive enforcement model, i.e. limit traffic between networks of different trust levels to that which is allowed and block everything else.
You can choose what services to use with Google Now, so if the idea of Google parsing your e-mails sounds like an invasion of privacy, you can limit it to just Web history and location information.
State tax officials have been gunning for Amazon for years due to its huge e-commerce revenues and strategic efforts to limit the number of states where it had a physical presence.