I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.
Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I’d probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.
Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.
Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.
It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven’t used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.
In short, I have done some things to get away from Google’s suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole…
I would get off google if I were you
I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.
Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I’d probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.
Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.
Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.
It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven’t used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.
In short, I have done some things to get away from Google’s suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole…