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Discussion on: What I Use Now Instead Of Google

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ejwaibel profile image
Erik Waibel

I am a slave to my Google overlords and have no plans to leave them anytime soon. Until something else can come along that makes things just as convenient as the Google ecosystem, I'm stuck. I've already signed my life and privacy over to them and I've accepted it. I have yet to find an ecosystem that makes my life, and my family's lives, as easy and convenient as Google does.

Maybe for die-hard geeks it makes sense to convert everything to whatever kind of mismash of technologies, but I'd rather not spend every week trying to figure out why my mail isn't syncing or what password I used for the 100s of sites my wife and I log into everyday.

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kr428 profile image
Kristian R. • Edited

Former colleague of mine at some point got his Google account locked for reasons unknown to him. No explanation given, except for a short notice (on second request) that this is a permanent decision and there is no way to change that. He lost everything connected to that. Everything: Access to his mail log. Access to his calendar. All photos stored in Google Photos. All documents stored in his Google Drive, including some professional planning and draft stuff. All apps he ever purchased on Google Play. And so on.

This happens rarely but it does, there are some reports out on the 'net on that too by other users who experienced the same. Kiras article mostly was caused by ethical and privacy reasons, some of them which I share and pretty much agree with (but that might be a filter-bubble issue or too much reading - take the time and browse through some pages of, say, Shoshana Zuboffs writings on "surveillance capitalism" - theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/... - and you might at least understand thinking down that road). But this is a rather personal opinion and a good starting point for enthusiastic disputes. ;)

From a mere tech perspective, and also from a buyer perspective, I still do use some Google services because, actually, they're pretty good at what they do, but it seems extremely dangerous to keep all of my "digital things" in the hand of one single entity, of completely being at the mercy of this single entity for better or for worse. Over-reliance on one single vendor almost never is a good idea, and in some cases, choosing alternatives is rather easy. At the very least, it would be a good idea to have backups of everything kept at that one particular vendor - backups that are up-to-date, checked reasonably often, updated reasonably often as well. And, maybe, an answer to that question, just for oneself: What happens if that one vendor decides to terminate my access virtually overnight, at that point at which "easy" turns into "nightmare" all of a sudden?

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zylch11 profile image
Waqas Ahmed

This is spot on, I have been using protonmail & DuckDuckGo for over 2 years now because they work just as good as Google'e products without the privacy caveat. I am an addict to Youtube unfortunately but there is no alternative to that.
I don't think its possible for me to completely ditch Google because in the end their products "just work" and there are no alternatives.

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codewander profile image
codewander

Invidious