[akie]

But how can we trust what you say? Google is not necessarily a very trustworthy company anymore.

Case in point, the subject at hand: people who said they did not want to be tracked, now have to find a setting and say it again. That does not inspire confidence in the company, and as a proxy, it doesn't give me much hope that I can trust what you say.

[yreg]

Well if you don't trust them then probably don't use them, since they could save your activity no matter the state of the tracking toggle in the UI.

[akie]

I try to avoid them wherever possible. There are quite a few decent alternatives for many of their core services.

[autoexec]

You can't escape google. I've seen even government websites require code from Google's servers. Just like if you choose to never sign up for facebook account they'll still create a secret profile for you and populate with every scrap of data they can learn about you from other facebook users as well as from data purchased from data brokers. We can choose to limit our direct participation with these companies (and that's a good idea) but you don't get to choose to opt out of them.

[akie]

What you can do is the following:

0. Use Firefox, not Chrome

1. Install an ad-blocker (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...)

2. Install ghostery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/)

3. Install Cookie Auto-Delete (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...)

4. Use Google Container (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...)

Then start advocating using https://plausible.io/ over Google Analytics in your own sites where possible, and use https://search.brave.com/ or https://duckduckgo.com/ for search.

For e-mail there are many options besides gmail.

[scim-knox-twox]

> Well if you don't trust them then probably don't use them [...]

Sure, easy to say…

GAFA is everywhere, and most people can't escape them. For example: there are a lot of websites that allow register only by FB / Google account.