I’m curious because I see a ton of Google hate on here daily. It’s certainly not all unwarranted, and I do agree with some of the privacy concerns.
That being said I do very much enjoy their products. Gmail, Photos, Chrome, Gemini, Home, Assistant, YouTube, Pixel phones, etc… I’ve tried out many of the alternatives but always come back to their ecosystem.
Curious as to how many of you here on the fedi use Google products without the common associated angst from the FOSS community.
I’m not whom you’re asking for but I’m obligated to say:
With many of these products, you are the product being sold. I especially don’t understand the point about going back w/ alternatives, eg gmail is just an email service; nothing changes for you as the end user if you just use a different email provider. Same for Photos, it’s just a cloud hosting service. I only ever used it for syncing so I could replace it with syncthing, although I don’t because I don’t really care about accessing my photos on multiple devices. If I need a specific photo I’ll grab it via usb cable or if I’m getting a new phone I’ll copy over all the photos etc to my computer before wiping the phone. But if you need to sync you can just use syncthing, if you specifically need cloud hosting there are more privacy-respecting options out there that aren’t by ad companies.