i don’t want to offend anyone, but some open source/privacy enthusiasts dislike google, but why?? google has made chromium, android, etc and most of the things they do are open source, and not only that, they also support creative commons media or public domain. i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you. i love google personally because of their commitment to open source software.
If you disagree, I’m sorry you can’t remember when there was a time that it was infinitely better. It was so good, in fact, that their name actually became a verb. Crazy, right?
They’re slowly killing Waze by removing features. Believe it or not, that app used to be even cooler too.
Yeah, have to agree on that. Especially if I’m looking for something niche. It used to be the opposite, you went to google if you were looking for something hard to find.
Bing seems to be a lot better for my search needs right now. Duckduckgo is just… a mess if you ask me. No relevance to results whatsoever, I usually find what I was looking for in the 10th link or so… or not at all. After 10, 15 results, duckduckgo just returns irrelevant results.
The image search in Google has gotten better though, so I still use that.
Basically, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and host of other American companies collect a lot of information about citizens. So much in fact that the US government decided it was good to have access to it. That, and many other things, were revealed by Snowden and other patriots.
The information has been sold to insurance companies to modify their premium for certain groups of the population. It is used to profile minorities, track activists, intimidate political opponents, fund wars abroad, and so much more. It even affects how people vote, which means that companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have tangible influence on elections.
When the Nazis invaded countries, they used the information gathered by governments to find the Jews, and we know what happened afterwards. It was Jews then, but what if you happen to be the group targeted in the next upheaval?
Google (and companies like it), also like to use their power to snuff out competition which slows down innovation.
Black and white
The world isn't black and white. Google does amazing things, good things, but it also does many bad things. For those who care, the bad things outweigh the good. It's like drug cartels in Brazil, Colombia, and other countries: they build schools, enforce their own laws, invest in infrastructure, have political candidates, and sometimes even a form of democracy, but in the background, they violently murder rivals, fight fierce battles with law enforcement, assassinate political opponents, facilitate addiction, employ children and teens, and so much more.
If you didn't know about the bad things drug cartels do, would you support them and love them like you do Google?
I’m very sorry but maybe I will downvote this comment! I don’t agree a lot. I know the world is not black and white, but sometimes, the black or the white is more noticeable in someone, which can show how they truly are!! And again as you said, the governments aren’t black or white, so having access to data can be good or bad. And I don’t support harming or ending the life of people, and Google has not done that and I hope they never will!!
i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you.
Is just super problematic. I appreciate the enthusiasm for open source, but google is a monopoly actively involved in making the internet worse in order to profit from it. They do this by leveraging your personal information, and that's bad.
One more thing concerning the ‘open source’. Most things Google does aren’t open.
You mentioned Chromium. I don’t think it would have become the most used browser platform if it hadn’t been open. So I’m not sure if it’s a gift or marketing decision. They kinda use it to spy on people/track behaviour. And push the web-standards they like. It’s part of their strategy to retain control over every part along the way and dominate the internet. From servers, to network infrastructure to the end users device and even their software that displays the webpages.
With Android they take extra care to move more and more things into their propretary Google Services. I think the Calendar is kinda unmaintained, the ASOP keyboard is very bare. Half the Apps don’t work without Play Services, Push Notifications are an important part of todays world but proprietary. The camera doesn’t even have half it’s capabilities and the Play Store is set to assert control over the ecosystem. Contactless Payment doesn’t work with open source, …
With Google, their open source always comes with strings attached. They’re not doing it for your benefit.
If you compare it for example with Meta, they just give away PyTorch, React and their Llama2 models because they can and it’ beneficial to them. I don’t see too many strings attached there.
But Google has a few of those, too. TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Gerrit, Angular and the two or three programming languages.
If you like being dominated and the future of the web being shaped for you by a single company, or your wants and needs align well with their motives, I don’t have any objections, though.
at least they have done something for open source, something you and I can modify and maybe even turn it into a privacy-oriented browser. even android has custom roms, what matters is what can be done with the source code! And by the way, I am not dominated, because I use duckduckgo and open source software.
The bad thing is, I don’t think you even need to use it to be dominated. Google uses their 70% market share to push things like the Web Integrity API or new fingerprinting methods whether you use it or not. Diversity get’s thrown under the bus anyways. I’ve had a bit of a look at WebRTC during the videoconferencing times. It mainly matters what codecs Safari and Chrome implement these days.
Whatever messenging app your friends have preinstalled dictates if you can videocall them.
And their gmail account if the mails from your open source mailserver get accepted or just dumped into the spam folder.
I also use Android and have a Chromium based browser ready. I’m somewhat okay with it. But I don’t think that changes anything in the broader, global picture.
It affects me. I have to use Meta’s messenger instead of having an open and interoperable solution if I want to stay in contact with my friends. I can’t participate in contactless payments with my phone or rent those stupid e-scooters. My online banking app works, but I’m not sure if I could for example charge an electric car without a smartphone that has Google Services installed.
And I think a big tech company can’t buy their way out of something by also giving away a few open source things. The projects might be nice and usable and lead by smaller and distinct teams. But it doesn’t really make me like the company as a whole if 95% of their business is something else.
You can be absolutely sure they’re selling it to every company and national government that will pay for it.
If you’re part of a marginalized group that some government would like to commit a human rights violation against in the last decade, chances are Google was a gleeful enabler on the government side.
I worked for a certain “big data” company that bought browsing histories from Google (and many other companies). They absolutely sell your data; and without even anonymising the personal identification information before selling it.
(I lasted 6 weeks before the lack of ethics forced me to quit. Needed the job to pay rent and buy groceries, but I couldn’t buy enough soap to cleanse my soul).
They did also kill hangouts... and pretty much every other messaging platform they've ever created, sometimes just for kicks. It might be incompetence as opposed to anything malicious there.
(this is unrelated but I’m not trolling, I’m very sorry if my opinion about Google is bad, but I am ok with hearing the opinions of other people and maybe change a little bit, I don’t only love Google, I also love open source, Ubuntu, etc)
Chromium is open-source. Chrome is not and also happens to constitute a majority of the browser market, and Google has tried multiple times to cash in on this market share to benefit their primary business of advertising to the detriment of users (FLoC, Manifest v3, Web Environment Integrity).
Likewise, AOSP is open-source, but Google has been progressively dismantling it and making various components closed-source (most recently the dialer app).
All this to say, Google is absolutely not friendly to FOSS. As a corporation, they’re beholden to their shareholders above all else and they should be treated as an amoral entity, the same as every other publicly-traded company.
google isn’t amoral , i’m sorry but, what about the google employees who use debian?? or who use krita?? those people are changing the environment!! and the only case in which they can be seen as amoral, is when they are asked for data to the government.
I’m sure they have some Firefox users too. It’s going to take a lot more than a few employees using Linux to convince me they wouldn’t steal both of my kidneys and leave me in an icy hotel bathtub.
Public companies are by definition amoral. They’re beholden to their shareholders and virtually every decision they make is informed by this obligation. Morality generally only factors into their decision-making insofar as it affects PR and thus the bottom line.
I don’t mean to say that Google or any other company is immoral. I use amoral to simply mean that they operate independent of morality. No public company, no matter how much you may like them, is your friend at the end of the day.
Chrome itself isn’t the real problem, how they managed to get Chromium everywhere is. You have one real alternative and that’s Firefox (and derivatives) and it’s barely surviving, which sucks.
Sure, they might not get as much money directly from non-Chrome browsers, but they get to push standards through Chromium.
Because they are above all else an advertising company. Businesses like having somewhere to advertise, of course… but overall consumers don’t like ads. Chrome, Android and gmail are simply ways to steer people to google search so they can sell ads. Then, like Facebook, their bread and butter is essentially privacy invasion - gathering huge dossiers of personal information on everyone they can. Google also has a reputation for being somewhat arrogant, as far as their work culture (only hiring people from elite universities, and having ridiculous ‘clever’ interview questions) as well as launching products, getting people to depend on them, then cancelling them with little notice or replacement. In addition, while their main product was innovative for the first several years, it’s declined significantly in quality, but their near-monopoly status makes it difficult for anyone else to effectively compete. Another issue is that like Facebook, Google has basically no customer service for anyone not spending 5 million a month with them. If they decide to close down your account based on who-knows-what algorithm thing, unless you get lucky on social media or have good connections, you’re screwed and all your stuff is permanently deleted.
yes but they do it legally and only what you type in the internet while you are connected to a google account, and maybe your contacts but that is up to you!! you have the freedom to limit how much data google uses!! and i personally like it because the algorithm recommends me good linux products.
"Legal" doesn't immediately mean "moral". Everything is legal as long as there isn't a law specifically banning it, and those laws often only get created as a result of someone abusing their legal right to something.
Google collects also way more data than you pointed out, in every avenue possible. Ever solved a captcha? You likely helped Google train their image recognition AI. Got an android smartphone (a brand that previously had committed itself to being open-source and linux based)? Have fun with pre-installed unremovable Google Spyware. You're forced to create a GMail account to interact with the whole App ecosystem of the market.
Google can remotely (without your consent) download and delete apps on your smartphone, read your personal data (including stuff you have saved on your SD card) and accesses your camera, pictures and GPS-Data regularly.
I just read an article to prepare for writing this comment and feel actually sick now, I wanna jump ship and get an independent OS, screw the AppStore...
One of the main priorities of the google maps cars is to also map wireless networks, so when your phone locates a wireless network, Google also knows your location (and the location of those connected to said network).
Note: This is also done passively by Android phones.
funny thing is, a guy i went to jr high with (in calgary) ‘invented’ a program called bumptop. a few years later less than a year, the guy sold everything to google for a nice sum, and got a job. next android update…was basically bumptop. seems hes still doing well for himself, colour me a bit jealous lol
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