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.
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Made a decision long ago that I’m not going to browse the web, setup a calendar of life events or store my email with the largest advertising company in the world.
Their “eco system” is not the best and their hardware has been hit or miss over the years.
I understand why people do use them and I will use their products when absolutely required. I don’t hate them, I just avoid them.
I’m not whom you’re asking for but I’m obligated to say:
That being said I do very much enjoy their products. Gmail, Photos, Chrome, Gemini, Home, Assistant, YouTube, Pixel phones, etc…
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.
Hate is a strong word.
I prefer to avoid their services due to privacy, and because over the long term, they’re unreliable. Any other for-profit corporation that tries to offer a bunch of free SASS products is going to end up with privacy issues as well; knowing the incentives lets us predict the outcome.
I’m keeping my Pixel 4a as long as I possibly can though.
Me. Drive is useful, youtube is addicting, gmail is… fine, once you figure out a few things.
i used to love google… ive been around since the beginning and used many of their products.
it feels like a friend or family member thats slid into serious meth or other drug use… you can only stick around attempting to help them for so long. at some point you know you have to cut your losses or be further dragged into their destruction.
when they dropped the ‘dont be evil’ was right around the time i also realized they dont actually support their products, and kill them on a whim. i jumped ship ~2012 when they started fuckin around with google voice and had no real ambition with G+. .
If it’s any consolation, they haven’t killed Google Voice. They haven’t updated it since 2012, but it’s still around.
I get updates a couple times a year.
But it hasn’t changed
They didn’t drop the don’t be evil thing. It’s still right there in the code of conduct where it always was, they just moved it to the conclusion of the document so it’s the last thing that remains with you. See for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
The supposed removal is a perfect example of the outrage-bait headlines I’m discussing in another comment.
There’s a whole Wikipedia page covering the motto drop. And yes, it was an ugly move deserving of all the bad press.
From literally the first paragraph stating it’s still there.
The original motto was retained in Google’s code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. Between April 21st and May 4th of 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct’s preface and retained in its last sentence.[9]
So it’s dropped from the motto?
Yes, they dropped it.
It was a Warrant canary
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If they removed it from the preface and pasted it at the beginning of every paragraph throughout the entire document, a certain type of person would still be focused on the one place they removed it from. Those are not serious people and should not be taken seriously.
right there […] where it always was.
they just moved it to the conclusion
Make up your mind, which one is it?
They definitely stopped living by that mantra at the same time. It may exist as a footnote to this giant code of conduct but it hasn’t been their MO in over a decade. The reaction is justified.
I loved them for a long time and was around since the beginning as well. When they opted everyone into Buzz without their consent I became real cautious about what I share with them. I still use some services, and even used Stadia when they had it. However, I’m ready for them to turn anything off at any time and don’t share any info with them that I wouldn’t want public.
I hate all corporations lol
Google have done a lot of great things and run some really vital projects that have benefitted the world. Anyone that refuses to acknowledge that is not coming at things honestly.
Alternatively, if there was no Google or Google like company, we would likely be much further along in tech, and have better functioning democracies. They have limited innovation in maps and search products. They rely on being big to be competitive. Their products are pretty poor given their engineering team size. Digital advertising: they bought their way into a quasi monopoly, siphoning dollars from people that actually create things.
Not trying to compare google to the Nazis, but this reads a lot like “but he build the Autobahns”.
Yeah that’s my take on it, too.
Plus they’re far too big for “Google” to be a useful entity in discussions. The Google C-suites? The CEO? The Maps team? The Mail team? The support for end-user customers? Need to be more specific, because I bet the Mail team is bigger than some competing companies in their entirety.
I’m happy with most of their stuff and use it a lot (calendar, drive, keep etc) but I know not to trust them not to kill things. I keep an IMAP copy of my emails and a local copy of my photos just in case…
I hate all capitalist enterprises even if I use them.
Nice try, paid Google shill.
I dislike a lot of what Google has done to their product and how people have screwed up searches with SEO nonsense. Recipes are a prime example of what I dislike about Google. Gemini is way less useful than the Assistant used to be. I’m still waiting for Microsoft to dip their toes back into the cell phone market or see some FOSS alternatives to Android/iOS that are supported by service providers. Ultimately I just have to put up with it.
I wanted to like Google, I bought into the whole ecosystem and still regularly use my gmail account, but they’ve fallen quite far in my eyes. They’ve killed off multiple features I used extensively, Search, the thing they should be good at, just isn’t as dependable as it used to be, I don’t trust using Chrome anymore, and the company overall just seems like a pale reflection of its former self. I just don’t trust them as a company. Not as bad as Meta or anything Musk touches, but still bad.
“
Don’tBe Evil”
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It’s not the company it once was, but there are also a lot of outrage-bait headlines about it that don’t hold up well to scrutiny.
For instance, there have been a lot of Lemmy posts about Chrome supposedly removing the APIs used by adblockers. I figured I’d validate that on my own by switching to the version of uBlock that is based on the new API. Well… As it turns out, it works fine. It’s also faster.
Mind you, figuring out the actual facts behind each post gets exhausting, and people just shutting down and avoiding the problem space entirely makes some sort of sense. That, and it is healthy for an ecosystem to have alternatives, so I’d keep encouraging usage of Firefox and such if only on that basis alone.
I don’t hate Google. I don’t trust them and I don’t think anyone else should either. Vet the products and services you use. But I don’t hate them.
Agree with this. I think this also should extend to every corporation.
This is it. I didn’t hate them because “big tech” like other people here. I loved Google and their stuff. But one by one they killed my favorite things, and they made me hate them.
If you don’t hate Google for killing s service you loved them your just waiting for them to do it.
They’ve killed a fair few of the services I’ve liked over the years. But there are other services I still like (with caveats) that I still use so it’s a mixed bag for me. If they kill those services I’ll move on to others.
100% this. I don’t hate them at all. I just can’t trust them ever anymore
