[killjoywashere]

Of all the people in this thread swearing they don't use Google, I wonder how many are writing their comments using Chrome (or Chromium, or Edge, or Brave, or Opera, or any other browser that uses the guts of the Chromium project)

[psunavy03]

"I don't use Facebook!" (goes off to check Instagram account)

[christophilus]

I use DuckDuckGo for search, Apple Maps when on my iPhone, and Gnome Maps when on my computers. My main browser is Firefox, but I use Brave (Safari-based) on iOS due to better ad blocking there. I use local markdown files for all of my note taking, and Fastmail for email.

But I am aware that I’m not typical.

[fooker]

Firefox is funded by Google.

Apple gets billions from Google, funding quite a bit of their R&D.

Most of the open source software you use including the Linux kernel has a bunch of contributors from Google.

Going one step further, Google has a large hand in open standards for everything, from wifi to programming languages.

I'm not saying you should avoid these, it's just interesting that you can take so many non-typical steps to avoid google and still mandatorily have them involved in all of your technology.

[squigz]

Is it that interesting? How might you expect one to avoid Google's influence in standards? Whereas Firefox is one of the few mainline browsers that isn't directly controlled by Firefox.

In short, taking some of these steps is reasonable for a person, and some... are not. Painting it as some kind of moral hypocrisy isn't helpful.

[einpoklum]

I'd guess only a minority.

However, we should also remember that Mozilla's main funder is... Google/Alphabet, via a royalty deal for having Google be the default search engine. See, e.g., here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

And while the royalties arrangement is not that old, Google was a main funder before that happened as well. FYI.

[CivBase]

So far I've replaced Google products with Firefox (even on mobile), Kagi/DDG, Proton Mail, Simple Mobile Tools, my own FTP server, Emby, and F-Droid.

But I also still use Android, the Google Play Store, YouTube (via NewPipe), Google Messages, Google Maps, and Google Keep because I haven't found great alternatives. It's surprisingly hard to completely get rid of Google.

[cloudking]

Don't forget.. As of February 2024, there are approximately 3.6 billion Android users worldwide, spread across 190 countries.

[Liquix]

Eh, Firefox is blazing fast and readily available. Avoiding ReCaptcha on the other hand...