They help maintain the surveillance state. What more do you need?

For me it always felt a bit weird to give google all this data about me, but it was so convenient and their services often are very good and definitely user friendly. So I always told myself, what’s the worst they can do? They are a corporation and they would only hurt themselves if they used their data against their users. And anyway they are US based. The USA are the biggest and oldest democracy which wouldn’t allow evil forces to gain power.

Yeah, that was that.

Basically once they started being a military contractor actively implementing new AI solutions aiding Israel, the US, and more. Or, when they started doing evil instead of avoiding it.

(Please don’t @ me with all the “yeah but they did THIS AND THAT years ago… we all have our own cutoff point).

I feel there is a certain maximum amount of influence a for profit company should be allowed to grow to. They have long surpassed it.

The advertising has become the engine in every possible corner. It’s like searching billboards now, not websites. My email feeds the ads I get. My Gboard keyboard for my text messages feeds the ads I’m shown. Hell the websites I visit get advertised back to me. Google Lenovo for work reasons and a year later I’m still getting fed ads for Lenovo on other platforms that have no association with Google. It’s like the Adoring fan of Oblivion who really really wants to make me happy by offering me things he heard me mention once Every. Single. Day! Dude stop! Shut up and leave me the fuck alone.

I wish I could shove Google off a cliff.

Originally it was because suggested results were a waste of time and I had used linux in grad school. I liked being able to use my computer how I wanted. As I learned more and more the ethics became a strong enough motivator I got rid of gmail and stopped using google maps. I’m 100% degoogled now, and I never looked back. Sometimes I have friends or people at work who want to collaborate using google products. I tell them I take an ethical stance against it. I will never go back.

Fuck their greed.

If you want a more elaborate answer, they hold too much power over users and they stopped truly innovating years ago.

They were evil back then as well but Google Now and Inbox were ways to siphon data that benefited users as well

If Google randomly decides to terminate my account for some reason and won’t tell me why or allow me to reasonably appeal, I’m screwed.

GDrive, my YouTube, my play store purchases, my Gmail going back since forever, and even all these 3rd party sites where I used “login with Google” could be instantly toasted and irrecoverable.

I became aware that this is way way too much exposure to one company and every component is linked together so if, hypothetically, I left a comment on YouTube that triggered some angsty AI ban algorithm, which led to the whole account getting zapped, I would be one sad puppy.

Better to selfhost, encrypt all, and be in control of my own destiny.

didn’t see anyone touching on the most important part, and that is the decisions regarding our data we make now are coming to bite us in the ass five or ten years from now. our chicken brains can’t comprehend that, not really. we need a direct feedback loop: hot stove, finger, ouch - no more touching.

up until a decade or two ago, we didn’t have the concept of forever in our lives. do stupid shit in school, in uni they don’t know about it. fail at one job, the next one doesn’t know about it. say something stupid in front of a love interest, the next one’s blissfully unaware. in our current paradigm, all of them transgressions are with you, forever.

any and all corporations even adjacent to the advertising/harvesting/mining industries have lost the benefit of doubt, forever. our interaction with them is and should be adversarial from the get go. they should never be in the position to retain any meaningful data points and polluting their ingestion avenues and obscuring activity is mandatory.

edit: the AI example is touching on it.

My motivations are not specific to google.

I don’t want a large part of my life and thoughts to be linked to my identity, queryable in someone else’s database.

I grew up in DDR and know that a large fraction of people gain pleasure by having control over others. That data is an important avenue for that.

You can already see that governments all over the EU are trying to gain control over it. (To keep the children safe ofcourse).

To me it’s about how invasive and all-encompassing Google tries to be, while giving little to no respect to our privacy.

I never explicitly and clearly agreed for a random company to follow me everywhere on the Internet, track me on millions of sites even outside Google itself, and be as reckless with the data as a kid, selling it left and right to whoever might concern. Neither do I think regular people would give such consent if consequences would be clearly explained, and not buried deep into ToS.

No, I do not have much to hide. But even if you don’t do anything bad, you don’t want a random stranger to constantly look into your windows when you’re at home, do you? It’s creepy at least. For me, Google is that stranger. And Meta. And Microsoft. And Apple etc.

So, making as little room for them in my life as humanly possible is my goal.

Im a private person. I dont feel comfortable people knowing what i did, where i went etc. That applies to big tech as well. I dont have social media and never will.

Plus, i hate ads.

privacy and political reasons: google has been firing employees that support palestine for fucks sake

source: The Verge

i dont want google profiting by sending my data to the gov whos paying for it with my tax money

@CheeseToastie
Mainly political. While privacy and security are a concern, I’m more focused on stop using products by big corporations, in particularly those with ties to fascist parties and government agencies and I’m very wary of those who try to sell their products as “private and secure FOSS alternatives” while holding similar fascistic ideas.