I’m new to this idea and a Google girl so I’m interested in learning more. I’m not good with tech, but if it’s necessary I’ll do it as much as I can.
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I dont have social media
Except for lemmy, I guess
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In addition to the privacy aspect, i wanted to reduce my dependency on outside/external factors as much as possible. I try to self-host and use FOSS where possible. Where not feasible, I try to diversify companies so I’m not overly reliant on one. That way, I can pivot much quicker if a company goes to shit.
That’s sensible
There’s the privacy and constant tracking part of it, but it is also about not being hostage of the company. What if Drive is suddenly a payed-only service OR they lock me out of my account? I can recover faster and cheaper from a failing HDD in my NAS than I ever could from a locked (or deleted) Google account.
I’ve seen / was burned too many times by free software and services that suddenly disappeared of became overpriced and I don’t want to be on that position again. Google is well known for killing stuff as well.
Yeah they might lose your account out of sheer incompetence, or because they can’t be bothered to fix a mistake –why care when they are not accountable to anyone except shareholders.
There was that fun story of the guy who had the misfortune to take a picture of his son to send the doctor, which was flagged as cp and lost all his accounts, the police got involved, and even after the police cleared him Google refused to give him back his account…
Absolutely. In a previous company, we migrated from on-site MS Exchange to Google Mail (ugh). Apart from it being a crap experience (it was a new service), and feeling like we were beta testers as things kept changing daily, so writing training material was a PITA, once there was an outage, and even though we had ~10K users on it, they basically said “get in line” when we were chasing for updates etc even though we were a paying customer!
Fuck them.
My data is my data. Period. Or at least it should be.
Abuse of position as dominant provider of search engine (incl. censorship) and mobile OS.
Labour Practice.
e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_GoogleSimiliar reasons apply to Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, PayPal, X and so on since well before Trump & Co.
e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_TechAppologies for my aggressive tone. I really hate these companies / their owners and what they are doing to our society, wellbeing, and humanness. It could have turned out so much different, if not for their greed and egoism!
Nothing is free. If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.
Privacy (different from anonymity) has become more and more important to me, and Google had access to nearly every part of my life in one way or another. I’ve cut out Musk, Zuck and Bezos, and I’m now nearly completely Google free as well.
I’ve often heard “why do I care if Google reads my emails? I’ve got nothing to hide”. 2 great answers:
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Unlock your phone and give it to me for an hour. Just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean you don’t want privacy. Google does exactly that.
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Speaking of privacy, why bother closing the stall door in a public washroom? You’re not doing anything wrong in there.
Ugh, “I’ve got nothing to hide” 🙄
My answer has been for a long time, “then take a stroll down main street naked, and tell your deepest secrets to strangers”. Of course you have something to hide, otherwise you’re a soulless shell of a person.
I’ve got nothing to hide
is a false dychotomy. you’re not hiding, you’re deciding what to share and that’s a huge difference.
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i dont want google profiting by sending my data to the gov whos paying for it with my tax money
@CheeseToastie Spending my money in autocratic countries is like buying them the weapons they will point at me to take away my freedom.
Giving my data to them is pretty much the same as they monetize it.
didn’t see anyone touching on the most important part, and that is the decisions regarding our data we make now are coming to bite us in the ass five or ten years from now. our chicken brains can’t comprehend that, not really. we need a direct feedback loop: hot stove, finger, ouch - no more touching.
up until a decade or two ago, we didn’t have the concept of forever in our lives. do stupid shit in school, in uni they don’t know about it. fail at one job, the next one doesn’t know about it. say something stupid in front of a love interest, the next one’s blissfully unaware. in our current paradigm, all of them transgressions are with you, forever.
any and all corporations even adjacent to the advertising/harvesting/mining industries have lost the benefit of doubt, forever. our interaction with them is and should be adversarial from the get go. they should never be in the position to retain any meaningful data points and polluting their ingestion avenues and obscuring activity is mandatory.
edit: the AI example is touching on it.
That’s a really good point. We’ve lost control of this information
Cause fuck ‘em, that’s why.
You god damn fucking right!
Deny the parasite profit and engagement
i don’t like the fact that fbi, nsa, cia, etc. could have access to my data. especially now
That single fed downvote haha
- I’m trying to be more anti-large corporation, especially those that have bent the knee to Trump.
- I want to support the people who make replacement apps/services that have a DIY ethic about them.
- I kind of like the challenge of it, because it’s not all that easy…which in my mind shows that it’s necessary.
If you don’t want to DeGoogle, that’s fine. It’s a personal decision. If you have all the facts and determine you’d rather stay doing what you’re doing, that’s fine.
It’s not fine. If it was, then I wouldn’t degoogle.
I accept if someone wants to still support certain companies by using there products and services, but I don’t think it’s fine.
I’d add to that great list also the problem of the steady enshittification of Google products. Just today, I was driving with Google Maps and suddenly it asked if I wanted to stop at a McDonald’s. I haven’t been to McD’s in twelve years, so you know how terribly useful that suggestion was.
I find that Maps is one of the most difficult ones to get rid of. There are replacements of course, but they don’t change directions based on current traffic patterns. I also find that for these replacements the routing isn’t very good over medium/long distances.
Tracking people across the internet ought to be forbidden by law.
Moving away from US based/owned/managed services. But it takes times. Email and photos are the Hardest for me. Email because of all the account integrations and many accounts where you just can’t change your email address and photos as it requires all people involved in shared albums to migrate with me.
Moving email is hard indeed.
The easiest way forward is to get your own domain, it’s about 10EUR a year, but that doesn’t help retroactively.
I’m trying to generally distance myself from all the VC sprouted billionaire former ‘startups’. They’re a disease. Those smug faces as they turn what they promised to be ‘good’ into a company that develops autonomous killing machines. All those smug bastards at the inauguration, happily paying the deposit to cash in on fascism. Unfortunately Google out of all of them has the deepest claws in me I think, android phone (Apple is in the same club/cartel imo so not much help), gmail, etc.
Fuck their greed.
If you want a more elaborate answer, they hold too much power over users and they stopped truly innovating years ago.
They were evil back then as well but Google Now and Inbox were ways to siphon data that benefited users as well
