this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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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...
https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/google-bans-dad-for-sending-pics-of-toddlers-swollen-genitals-to-doctor/
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.