For me the point of de-googling is not to literally stop using every single Google service but to disengage enough that your entire online identity isn't tied to Google such that losing your account would be catastrophic.
For example, I still have a gmail account I use for lots of random things, but critical bank/financial accounts go directly to a separate fastmail address (where I am confident I could get a human to help me if there was a serious account problem). I still use Google Docs suite, but "important" documents are stored locally as Word/Excel files. I still use Google Drive/Google Photos, but I make periodic backups to a local SSD + other online backup services (iCloud/OneDrive). Etc.
I don't understand why you would want to "ditch every Google product and service". Some of them are objectively pretty great, or inherently have low switching costs (like Google Maps).
Simple. Google is in the business of collecting and monetizing my data and removing my privacy. I want them to have as little access to my life as possible.
Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you? Are advertisers following you around town? Bothering you at work? Hounding you in the loo? Personally it seems like my data has been stolen from just about every company I've ever given it to EXCEPT for Google.
I think we should applaud the people who take these steps.
These tech companies work with all the rest of the companies to use our own computers against us.
Most folks have normalized the data collection, the dark patterns and the faustian bargains that are now happening on a daily basis.
Treating them with ridicule is just not necessary. The folks who say no are really working for the rest of us.
I can give you a couple website that are intimately intertwined with google services:
- the california FTB website (califorina's IRS)
- the california DMV website (not only drivers licenses, but real id)
- kaiser permanente (health care)
Most normal people, or your kids, or your parents are required to use these sites (or it is very difficult not to use them). Why should they be tracked by advertisers? why should nobody complain?
for me its not about losing anything important or practicing safety with backups. i just dont want bloat and activity everywhere. too many connections too many extra features suggested or mandatory etc etc. i guess im a minimalist in that sense. just want cleaner faster everything even if its a bit more inconvenient.
MX record change and you’re off to the races. Tangentially, I’d also be interested in putting an acquisition together to acquire FastMail if ever in financial peril, in order for it to persist as a going concern and arguably, a public good (like Let’s Encrypt).
I can appreciate the hesitancy because you need an account, but Kagi is such a great search engine. Their incentives align much better with their actual users and because of that they support tons of customization/filtering options Google just can't (read: won't).
I tried Kagi once and never really felt like it was good enough to make me want to pay for it. Search is like air. Very important, but available everywhere for free. Pretty hard for me to justify adding another subscription to the already extant mountain.
Google is the air of a teeming metropolis in a developing country. Every breath is polluted with foreign substances that someone else out there. Your capacity suffers as each action is taxed by the aerosolized tar.
searX is mountain air. Pure, but cold and so so thin. You struggle to collect enough oxygen, waiting for the life-giving molecules to trickle in. A bracing adventure for most, a home for the hardy, adapted few.
DuckDuckGo is the air of a rich suburb. The pollution is manageable and pressure sufficient. You breathe freely, undistracted, content in the assumption that your essential need is satisfied. It is sufficient, comfortable, unremarkable, there.
Kagi is a seaside breeze, wafting the richness of a vibrant and alien ecosystem through your awareness. You may sense the oily tang of a nearby dockyard; it’s but one note in the harmony, fading behind the marine life, the ocean salts, the sizzling morsels of upshore boardwalk. You breathe deeply. Your awareness stretches, stitching scent to sound; your focus dances across the possibilities, musing which possibility to explore today. A corner of your mind resents the cost of your rented villa; another fantasizes about buying it, about making this place your home. Could I afford it…?
The only thing irreplaceable for me is Youtube. Even if it's gotten worse as a platform over time, I still consume it more than any other type of video media and there are no good alternatives for much of the content that I enjoy watching.
The good news is that none of the content you care about is Google's. As soon as someone else provides a space for content creators to move to you can get rid of Youtube and never miss a single thing about it. Google has successfully pissed off enough youtubers that they're just waiting for the first chance to jump ship, just like we are as watchers.
In the meantime, try to give as little as you can to Google. Use Newpipe and youtube-dl so you never see an ad.
This generously assumes that the new provider won't take the same steps YouTube did. I feel like the only solution is to not care all that much about watching videos.
Nebula is such a streaming service. From what I understand, they are a subscription based company that has a profit share incentive for it's creators. Consequently, the creators skew toward educational-esque content.
Yeah but operating a service like YouTube is such a money pit (given on recent HN threads I've read). It seems like they've been mostly able to work because of their huge ad network, targeting, etc.
That is so wild to me. I only consume media there if I am sent a link. Every time I have gone there I find content that is literally optimized to use up and waste as much of my time as possible under the incentive of maximizing viewer minutes. I wonder what it would be like to spend a day in your shoes.
> Every time I have gone there I find content that is literally optimized to use up and waste as much of my time as possible under the incentive of maximizing viewer minutes.
It's a feed, and it responds to your use. I click on longform educational content, I get lots of longform educational content. I find the act of opening clickbait videos in an incognito window along with judicious use of the "not interested" button has kept it quite usable.
Mindlessly consuming the video feed is not the only way to use YouTube. If you are looking for something in particular, it is very hard to beat. Besides, at that point, is it really any different than TV, or other streaming services?
> Every time I have gone there I find content that is literally optimized to use up and waste as much of my time as possible under the incentive of maximizing viewer minutes.
Depends on what you're watching.
I mean, everyone on YouTube is playing the algorithm game somewhat -- assuming they want to have their videos watched, and they do, or they wouldn't be there to begin with.
Having said that, I watch a ton of YouTube videos. Not randomly, like zapping through TV channels (do people still do that, by the way?). I watch videos from the dozens of channels I'm subscribed to, by authors I enjoy watching and about topics that are relevant to me. YouTube is unbeatable for this, because almost everyone is on YouTube, but few other video platforms are as universal.
And yes, I pay for YouTube Premium because ads absolutely break YouTube. Ads make everything worse. I'm still upset about the recent trend of authors placing "sponsor segments" embedded in their videos (looking at you, Squarespace -- you can go f*ck yourself); I wish paying for Premium automatically skipped these segments too, but oh well. At least some authors make self-deprecating jokes about their sponsored content.
I find it crazy that someone will say "I still consume it more than any other type of video media" but somehow just paying for it isn't an option. You can pay to make YT ads go away. And the payments go to the video creators (eventually).
I would pay for youtube if they provided an official API to download videos and stream videos in a client of my choice.
I prefer to watch youtube with a custom player (mpv+yt-dlp on desktop, newpipe on android). I do not want to watch youtube on the youtube website or official youtube android app. The custom clients I am using are unofficial. They reverse engineer youtube to make it work. They often break when youtube changes something.
Interestingly the comment you're responding and the article the comment is responding do not mention ads as the problem being solved by de-Googling.
I also think YouTube has gotten worse over time and I'd be happy to find a workable replacement despite being a long time YouTube Premium subscriber. I do use SponsorBlock though as I found supporting creators directly while paying YouTube for serving the content left still getting sponsorship ads as a bit ridiculous. It's a good product, just often intentionally shy of being great in interest of metrics
Flex the steelmaning and incentivize me to buy YouTube Premium when adblocking gives me the same functionality and I own the process to block.
I'm happy to watch an occasional ad. Maybe 2 minutes for every day, curated and high quality advertisements relevant to everyone. No, I will not pay with my data. No, I will not accept interruption in flow, within or between videos.
Interrupting during a video means adblocking is justified.
Adding adverts to nonmonetized channels means adblocking is justified.
It's my time. Google isn't paying for the use of my eyeballs, and I actively don't purchase things I see advertised via YouTube. I'm not alone in this; most people don't buy for digital ads. They already nefariously steal my data at every opportunity.
They by and large don't. Most creators on YouTube aren't even eligible to monetize, especially if they're making niche educational content.
Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.
There is a negligibly small percentage of content creators / content farmers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the platform and actually make good money, but let's not pretend you're patronizing the creators when you're paying for YouTube Premium.
I’m conflicted on this. I pay for YouTube premium - for background playing on my phone and for Ad-less on my TV.
I pay more for Netflix, and I use it a lot less.
So I’m airing on the side of agreeing, but I also think Googles tactics have been incredibly shoddy, and I can understand someone not wanting to support that.
Maybe they do pay for it? It's not obvious they don't. (edit: they mention they do pay for it below)
I would have written a similar comment and I pay for Premium. I don't use any other Google service at this point, but I do have an account just for YouTube (I dig into the privacy settings to disable all the things I can).
It wasn't really that hard if you use Apple for almost everything and Fastmail for mail.
I use DuckDuckGo for search and occasional search again on Google, but that's becoming less relevant over time with LLMs (and generally reddit or youtube is the best place to search anyway for most things).
I do pay for Youtube Premium precisely because it is something that I use basically every day. It's just kind of an opaque system where it's not really clear how much it is actually supporting video creators, how much of it is maintaining the service, and how much of it is lining Google's pockets.
I watch quite a bit of videos by creators with very lower viewership and sub counts and I suspect they're not seeing a penny.
Paying won't make Shorts go away. Nor will it remove the 8 other elements of the YouTube UI I have to block to make the site somewhat useable.
Also I believe the payouts are split entirely by watchtime. Three minutes of watching an original song with a high-quality music video is worth more to me than 8 hours of some game stream or rambling video essay I happened to have on in the background while doing chores, but if YTP values both equally per minute it'll basically send no money to the creators who I believe bring the most value to the platform. There's even a like/dislike system, but there's no indication that it matters for Premium money. Channel memberships and superchats don't even remove ads, so even if I did decide to sub on a per-channel basis, I'd still need an ad blocker.
You can’t pay YouTube to remove in-video ads that the video creators put in. For that you need SponsorBlock anyway, so might as well use a 3p client that supports blocking both kinds of ads, without giving money to Google to continue building ad surveillance software.
Like the OP I consume a ton of YouTube and despite my misgivings about Google, I was a long time subscriber to the YouTube/music combo deal until they started showing ads despite my subscription.
It would happen a few times a week, and if I'm being charitable I could chalk it up to a deployment error, but it happened too many times for me to not get the impression that no one at YouTube gives a shit about subscribers.
I've personally been watching YouTube less and less. The ads are insane. I would normally spend more time watching videos but it's become so disruptive
I think most of us can agree that many videos are unnecessarily long (as it's incentivized by the creator for ad revenue), so there's far more fluff in it. With the rise of LLMs, etc for getting knowledge fast , I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph. And when you add 30 second ads every 5 mins it makes it even less compelling
The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.
YouTube Premium took the win :(
> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph
Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.
But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.
It's harder to avoid bad quality videos that now you can't see downvotes.
As for the video being unnecessarily long - I have played with copying the transcript from the video into ChatGPT, but they tend to be too long for ChatGPT to handle.
This is also my preferred way of consuming YouTube. In addition to zero ads, you get instant seek, consistently high bitrate, ability to watch anywhere, and no autoplay for the kids to get sent down an addiction spiral.
> OpenStreetMap-based apps like Organic Maps are great and I frequently use them, but I find myself using the Google Maps website a lot, for tasks like searching for restaurants to getting an estimate of how long my commute is going to take.
Agreed, as someone who walks almost everywhere, Organic Maps is great on GrapheneOS.
The only things I use Google Maps for are more rare: (1) see what hours a store is open, which IIUC is being worked on by OSM; (2) planning a trip via public transit; (3) StreetView, which is really an awesome feature.
(1) in particular is something that you can easily contribute to fixing yourself. Organic Maps lets you edit store details from within the app.
Personally, (2) and (3) are the ones that keep me on Google Maps, along with the real killer feature for me which is that I can just search "good {coffee,food,whatever} near me" and get a list of pretty good recommendations.
Just about all of Apple's alternates to Google services are fine in my experience. I recently switched from Proton Mail to Apple Mail and have been satisfied saving a few bucks a month there. I don't know how to evaluate Apple's claims to privacy though.
I guess that's fine for diversifying the big corporate overlords you rely on, which I'll agree is an improvement over relying on Google for everything. But still, I wish there were open alternatives.
The impetus for my years long (i.e., lazy) effort to de-Google wasn't just about the privacy issues but that those seemed to stem from an utter lack of empathy for users overall.
In other words, it was recognizing an intolerable pattern of behavior, which seemed inevitable that it would cause me actual, material harm in some way eventually.
I was very much in the Google ecosystem and although privacy became an increasing concern, the final push for me was the horror stories who had their accounts suspended or were otherwise locked out with no recourse.
Does the collapse of all knowledge as we know it count as a material harm? Or is it a revolutionary opportunity to craft a new Knowledge Society independent and protected from the abuses of the old and failed knowledge order?
Although this author seems pretty reasonable with regards to actual privacy (preferring self-hosted software), I find the popular echo chamber of "avoid Google, they steal your data" quite misguided.
Yes, Google accumulates data and does stuff with it. But Google also has rigorous processes to lock down data and access to it, unlike virtually any small-to-medium cloud software provider. I've heard crazy stories like people looking up their friends' health insurance details for fun, just because almost everyone in the engineering part of that company had access to the production database.
Plus, Google is so large that it constantly receives attention by public institutions, which makes it harder to pull off shady stuff without getting caught. If <random SME> sells your data to the highest bidder who will spam you with cold calls, no one's gonna bat an eye.
Don't forget any large hoard of data is ripe for government abuse. It might not be a cold caller but a police department parallel constructing you into a crime conviction using faulty GPS data.
Never though of it that way: With enough data, it's likely to find something that looks suspicious, for some definition thereof, even if just due to software errors. When looked at in isolation, this could convince people like real evidence.
OP and I are very similar lol. I bought a Pixel 7 Pro on eBay specifically so I could use Graphene (screw buying new; used is good for the planet and it doesn't give money to Google). So far, I have been loving it!
Also switched to Organic Maps, but still use Google Maps for finding businesses/hours. Organic Maps is nice, but searching for directions is awful (at least in my South Florida area). Typing in any address tends to return results that only show the name of the street, and they're all identical. E.g. just a bunch of "Southwest 123rd Street, Florida", no house number or anything useful to distinguish them. Often times I'm forced to use Google Maps. This is currently the hardest Google service to quit for me.
I went from DDG to Kagi, and stuck with Kagi because of the superior results. Luckily I got in early, and have an early adopter plan. It's a shame they can't offer better pricing though because it really is a superior service. Recently I've had some privacy concerns that have made me a bit skeptical of Kagi, but it's hard for me to go back to DDG or even Google now. It's just that good.
For files I use Nextcloud exclusively. While it is slow and bloated as hell, I like it because I share the instance with family members, and it's easier for non-techie people to use it. It's also possible to mount it as a network drive using WebDAV so you can skip the bloated web interface. It works very well for me on KDE Dolphin.
For email I use ProtonMail with custom domain too. They're overpriced and overrated, but it's too much work for me to switch at this point, and their app isn't that bad. I would recommend FastMail to anyone looking for a new email provider though.
For YouTube, I use FreeTube. It's basically just a custom front end l. No ads, no spyware. Sure, I deprive creators of ad revenue, but that's a good thing. The less money they make on YouTube, the more likely they are to post on different services. I haven't heard of Nebula before, so I'll definitely be checking that out.
> For email I use ProtonMail with custom domain too. They're overpriced and overrated, but it's too much work for me to switch at this point, and their app isn't that bad. I would recommend FastMail to anyone looking for a new email provider though.
I went the opposite route, but I feel like Proton is better geared to business use (the plans and included products just seem more attractive to me). And yeah the Swiss angle is mostly PR but eh, maybe that could be useful and it's one more thing. "Defense in depth," kinda.
When I switched I didn't really notice Proton being that much more expensive for my uses either.
> I was even able to take trips through Uber’s mobile website, which was a pleasant surprise. The location functionality did not work, but I believe that was due more to the browser than to Uber itself.
I'm delighted that this works now.
Of course companies like the proprietary-platform apps, in some ways. So it's great to see a tech company also embrace Web open standards as an option for users/customers.
Readit News
For example, I still have a gmail account I use for lots of random things, but critical bank/financial accounts go directly to a separate fastmail address (where I am confident I could get a human to help me if there was a serious account problem). I still use Google Docs suite, but "important" documents are stored locally as Word/Excel files. I still use Google Drive/Google Photos, but I make periodic backups to a local SSD + other online backup services (iCloud/OneDrive). Etc.
I don't understand why you would want to "ditch every Google product and service". Some of them are objectively pretty great, or inherently have low switching costs (like Google Maps).
These tech companies work with all the rest of the companies to use our own computers against us.
Most folks have normalized the data collection, the dark patterns and the faustian bargains that are now happening on a daily basis.
Treating them with ridicule is just not necessary. The folks who say no are really working for the rest of us.
I can give you a couple website that are intimately intertwined with google services:
- the california FTB website (califorina's IRS) - the california DMV website (not only drivers licenses, but real id) - kaiser permanente (health care)
Most normal people, or your kids, or your parents are required to use these sites (or it is very difficult not to use them). Why should they be tracked by advertisers? why should nobody complain?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/kaiser_patient_data/
Google is the air of a teeming metropolis in a developing country. Every breath is polluted with foreign substances that someone else out there. Your capacity suffers as each action is taxed by the aerosolized tar.
searX is mountain air. Pure, but cold and so so thin. You struggle to collect enough oxygen, waiting for the life-giving molecules to trickle in. A bracing adventure for most, a home for the hardy, adapted few.
DuckDuckGo is the air of a rich suburb. The pollution is manageable and pressure sufficient. You breathe freely, undistracted, content in the assumption that your essential need is satisfied. It is sufficient, comfortable, unremarkable, there.
Kagi is a seaside breeze, wafting the richness of a vibrant and alien ecosystem through your awareness. You may sense the oily tang of a nearby dockyard; it’s but one note in the harmony, fading behind the marine life, the ocean salts, the sizzling morsels of upshore boardwalk. You breathe deeply. Your awareness stretches, stitching scent to sound; your focus dances across the possibilities, musing which possibility to explore today. A corner of your mind resents the cost of your rented villa; another fantasizes about buying it, about making this place your home. Could I afford it…?
In the meantime, try to give as little as you can to Google. Use Newpipe and youtube-dl so you never see an ad.
It's a feed, and it responds to your use. I click on longform educational content, I get lots of longform educational content. I find the act of opening clickbait videos in an incognito window along with judicious use of the "not interested" button has kept it quite usable.
Depends on what you're watching.
I mean, everyone on YouTube is playing the algorithm game somewhat -- assuming they want to have their videos watched, and they do, or they wouldn't be there to begin with.
Having said that, I watch a ton of YouTube videos. Not randomly, like zapping through TV channels (do people still do that, by the way?). I watch videos from the dozens of channels I'm subscribed to, by authors I enjoy watching and about topics that are relevant to me. YouTube is unbeatable for this, because almost everyone is on YouTube, but few other video platforms are as universal.
And yes, I pay for YouTube Premium because ads absolutely break YouTube. Ads make everything worse. I'm still upset about the recent trend of authors placing "sponsor segments" embedded in their videos (looking at you, Squarespace -- you can go f*ck yourself); I wish paying for Premium automatically skipped these segments too, but oh well. At least some authors make self-deprecating jokes about their sponsored content.
I prefer to watch youtube with a custom player (mpv+yt-dlp on desktop, newpipe on android). I do not want to watch youtube on the youtube website or official youtube android app. The custom clients I am using are unofficial. They reverse engineer youtube to make it work. They often break when youtube changes something.
I also think YouTube has gotten worse over time and I'd be happy to find a workable replacement despite being a long time YouTube Premium subscriber. I do use SponsorBlock though as I found supporting creators directly while paying YouTube for serving the content left still getting sponsorship ads as a bit ridiculous. It's a good product, just often intentionally shy of being great in interest of metrics
I'm happy to watch an occasional ad. Maybe 2 minutes for every day, curated and high quality advertisements relevant to everyone. No, I will not pay with my data. No, I will not accept interruption in flow, within or between videos.
Interrupting during a video means adblocking is justified.
Adding adverts to nonmonetized channels means adblocking is justified.
It's my time. Google isn't paying for the use of my eyeballs, and I actively don't purchase things I see advertised via YouTube. I'm not alone in this; most people don't buy for digital ads. They already nefariously steal my data at every opportunity.
Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.
There is a negligibly small percentage of content creators / content farmers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the platform and actually make good money, but let's not pretend you're patronizing the creators when you're paying for YouTube Premium.
I pay more for Netflix, and I use it a lot less.
So I’m airing on the side of agreeing, but I also think Googles tactics have been incredibly shoddy, and I can understand someone not wanting to support that.
I would have written a similar comment and I pay for Premium. I don't use any other Google service at this point, but I do have an account just for YouTube (I dig into the privacy settings to disable all the things I can).
It wasn't really that hard if you use Apple for almost everything and Fastmail for mail.
I use DuckDuckGo for search and occasional search again on Google, but that's becoming less relevant over time with LLMs (and generally reddit or youtube is the best place to search anyway for most things).
I watch quite a bit of videos by creators with very lower viewership and sub counts and I suspect they're not seeing a penny.
Also I believe the payouts are split entirely by watchtime. Three minutes of watching an original song with a high-quality music video is worth more to me than 8 hours of some game stream or rambling video essay I happened to have on in the background while doing chores, but if YTP values both equally per minute it'll basically send no money to the creators who I believe bring the most value to the platform. There's even a like/dislike system, but there's no indication that it matters for Premium money. Channel memberships and superchats don't even remove ads, so even if I did decide to sub on a per-channel basis, I'd still need an ad blocker.
Like the OP I consume a ton of YouTube and despite my misgivings about Google, I was a long time subscriber to the YouTube/music combo deal until they started showing ads despite my subscription.
It would happen a few times a week, and if I'm being charitable I could chalk it up to a deployment error, but it happened too many times for me to not get the impression that no one at YouTube gives a shit about subscribers.
I think most of us can agree that many videos are unnecessarily long (as it's incentivized by the creator for ad revenue), so there's far more fluff in it. With the rise of LLMs, etc for getting knowledge fast , I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph. And when you add 30 second ads every 5 mins it makes it even less compelling
The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.
YouTube Premium took the win :(
> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph
Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.
But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.
As for the video being unnecessarily long - I have played with copying the transcript from the video into ChatGPT, but they tend to be too long for ChatGPT to handle.
Deleted Comment
Agreed, as someone who walks almost everywhere, Organic Maps is great on GrapheneOS.
The only things I use Google Maps for are more rare: (1) see what hours a store is open, which IIUC is being worked on by OSM; (2) planning a trip via public transit; (3) StreetView, which is really an awesome feature.
Personally, (2) and (3) are the ones that keep me on Google Maps, along with the real killer feature for me which is that I can just search "good {coffee,food,whatever} near me" and get a list of pretty good recommendations.
In other words, it was recognizing an intolerable pattern of behavior, which seemed inevitable that it would cause me actual, material harm in some way eventually.
Yes, Google accumulates data and does stuff with it. But Google also has rigorous processes to lock down data and access to it, unlike virtually any small-to-medium cloud software provider. I've heard crazy stories like people looking up their friends' health insurance details for fun, just because almost everyone in the engineering part of that company had access to the production database.
Plus, Google is so large that it constantly receives attention by public institutions, which makes it harder to pull off shady stuff without getting caught. If <random SME> sells your data to the highest bidder who will spam you with cold calls, no one's gonna bat an eye.
This would basically be the same as p-hacking.
Also switched to Organic Maps, but still use Google Maps for finding businesses/hours. Organic Maps is nice, but searching for directions is awful (at least in my South Florida area). Typing in any address tends to return results that only show the name of the street, and they're all identical. E.g. just a bunch of "Southwest 123rd Street, Florida", no house number or anything useful to distinguish them. Often times I'm forced to use Google Maps. This is currently the hardest Google service to quit for me.
I went from DDG to Kagi, and stuck with Kagi because of the superior results. Luckily I got in early, and have an early adopter plan. It's a shame they can't offer better pricing though because it really is a superior service. Recently I've had some privacy concerns that have made me a bit skeptical of Kagi, but it's hard for me to go back to DDG or even Google now. It's just that good.
For files I use Nextcloud exclusively. While it is slow and bloated as hell, I like it because I share the instance with family members, and it's easier for non-techie people to use it. It's also possible to mount it as a network drive using WebDAV so you can skip the bloated web interface. It works very well for me on KDE Dolphin.
For email I use ProtonMail with custom domain too. They're overpriced and overrated, but it's too much work for me to switch at this point, and their app isn't that bad. I would recommend FastMail to anyone looking for a new email provider though.
For YouTube, I use FreeTube. It's basically just a custom front end l. No ads, no spyware. Sure, I deprive creators of ad revenue, but that's a good thing. The less money they make on YouTube, the more likely they are to post on different services. I haven't heard of Nebula before, so I'll definitely be checking that out.
I went the opposite route, but I feel like Proton is better geared to business use (the plans and included products just seem more attractive to me). And yeah the Swiss angle is mostly PR but eh, maybe that could be useful and it's one more thing. "Defense in depth," kinda.
When I switched I didn't really notice Proton being that much more expensive for my uses either.
I'm delighted that this works now.
Of course companies like the proprietary-platform apps, in some ways. So it's great to see a tech company also embrace Web open standards as an option for users/customers.