[geor9e]

A danger with google is how flippantly they will ban google accounts for the dumbest things. Now theres a button to livesteam your browsing tied to your google account. I wonder how many people are going to lose 20 years of gmail Gphotos and GDrive files because they accidentally clicked gemini at the wrong moment on the wrong website.

[onehair]

I saw the new before I sleep, and slepped peacefully. Because I'd already switched to brave 2 years ago. And once more to firefox 2 months ago. With firefox I feel I finally own my browser and no company is gonna push things down my throat I didn't first agree to

[t_mann]

You might want to check Firefox' telemetry settings if you care about privacy. Or you can use Librewolf, it's an extension-compatible FF fork with privacy turned on.

[dodos]

Librewolf is great, but from my experience the default settings are painful for daily use. My biggest gripe is the auto-clear cookies on restart. I understand why it could be useful to some users, but for most I doubt they'd want that in a daily browser. This makes Librewolf need tweaking just as much as Firefox does which kind of ruins the point of it in my experience. (although you are tweaking for usability rather than privacy)

[navigate8310]

It's just a simple one-time tweak under settings to halt clearing cookies upon browser restart.

[drnick1]

Clearing cookies automatically is good for your privacy though and is a sensible default for a "hardened" configuration. If you use the password manager logging in again when you want to shouldn't be an issue.

[aucisson_masque]

It’s a hassle for 99% of the population, even with a password manager.

[antipaul]

The danger with google is that they suck at user experience

[beebmam]

Does Apple do this often? I've always wondered if iCloud is worth getting, given that it constantly spams me to use it with my iPhone

[dundundundun]

If they do close an account they have a support line you can call and talk to a human.

[tjohns]

For what it's worth, Apple closed my mom's account due to inactivity. (She hadn't used an Apple product since 2007.)

They do have phone support, but they refused to unlock the account and just said she'll never be able to use primary email account with Apple's systems because of the frozen account.

So yes, any cloud provider can lock you out for arbitrary reasons. Just because they answer the phone doesn't mean the customer support agent can actually do anything about it.

[SXX]

At $1 / month having 50GB end-to-end encrypted storage and hide-my-email is reasonable in case your choice is better privacy over controlling your own mail domain.

Photos sync to iCloud is terrible slow though compared to Google Photos - syncing 100GB take days and 500GB takes forever. At least it end-to-end encrypted with Avanced Data Protection. But yeah if you multi-TB photo archive buying large storage options of iCloud make no sense simply because it's impossible to use.

I'd better use self-hosted Immich.

[pram]

It has great features otherwise, I have like 100+ aliases with Hide My Email. You don't even need to use iCloud email with it.

[ghm2199]

Wait, how does this footgun work?

[smittywerben]

Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vacation 2020". By the way, do you want to compress your whole photo library to achieve Instagram quality while offering to consume more of the photos of your computer, disillusioned by the last few pennies of value that already fell. What's that? Your iCloud or Android device is out of space because the two ProRes videos your iPhone took after the commercial convinced the Apple user to engage the Apple proprietary video encoding button to maximize their Instagram engagement. The Samsung folds itself into a rolly-polly bug shell form. Eventually, all of your photos will be sent to Instagram, the final destination. Once there, after compressing your photos without asking, they will insist on your choosing ZSTD as the coffin.

So, on the consent-quality-useful triangle (WIP), Google is clearly eliminating quality and consent to provide you with a useful interface to the Google consentless compression box. Just what everyone wanted. The future is now.

Notification: You have 2 new views (details button: 2 ad-consenting views, 0 other views) on the photo you took of the compression artifact on a video that you suspect Google might have accidentally compressed without your consent, confusing itself to be Instagram. Unfortunately, your comparison photo gets equally confused and is compressed to be equally as bad as the compressed one. Now the photos look identical, and you look like a conspiracy theorist tweeting about "video encoding" from your Sesame Street Elmo phone, just like everyone else, with no issue at all. "We're in the Ourobouros. Maybe Paramount isn't the issue. Maybe it's Paramount Plus." The Samsung rolly-polly bug interrupts and insists this issue will have to wait because it's 2pm on Friday. Now, your Elmo phone is now the only device still working in the office, as you try to convince your wife why you have to stay late, "Because you're different than the rest of the people posting compression artifact-laden photos."