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I've got little more than anecdata to contribute as well. Personally, I make use of some Google products but have been very consciously trying to shift away from them. Too much data, too long a retention period, and too obvious a target for snoops (ours, theirs, black hats). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect. A few years ago, now, I was at a conference largely serving NGOs and the question of cloud computing came up. The idea was fairly novel then, and I expected the discussion to focus on technical aspects -- "how do we move our services to the cloud" type questions. Nuh uh. It was virtually all about privacy, data control, jurisdictional control, and other legal issues, as well as some discussion of lock-in and similar issues. Now, I think of these things, and they come up on a corporate context, but for these people, many of whom deal with refugees, undocumented aliens, whistleblowers, and others basically in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives, these were all very, very real issues. And this was years before Snowden's disclosures. Mind, I've followed online privacy issues for a few decades (and butt heads regularly with Lauren Weinstein on G+ over how significant Snowden's leaks were -- I say they're tremendous, he generally claims otherwise), but this level of direct awareness and concern in a largely non-technical audience was eye-opening. For myself: I decided to check out G+ and have stayed with it (though I quickly deleted my Real Name account). It has mostly not been particularly useful ... until early in 2013 where I found that rather than commenting about G+, I was actually using it to engage on other topics. I still see it as flawed (and quite possibly fatally so) in conception, but the technical underpinnings are very solid: the back-ends are fast, stable, and highly reliable, and even with rapid and continuous development the site rarely if ever breaks. Utility-wise it's been another story. The DOM is so bloated I can rarely keep more than a tab or three open (and constantly have to re-kill those to reclaim RAM), the interface is atrocious, the underlying data and interactions models are utterly broken, and more (I've posted long rants many times, they're on my G+ profile, and I'm really beyond caring now). I went to the extent of very extensively modifying the UI through a monster (nearly 2000 lines) CSS stylesheet fixing endless annoyances (to be fair, I do this to many sites, HN included, but none is as extensive as G+). Adding joy to this is Google's obfuscated CSS (it's run through some sort of minimizer) which does wholesale class renaming periodically. But other than G+ I've been trying to cut Google out. I set DDG as my search engine, returning to Google for a while before committing again this past June. The results are actually quite good, and though I return to Google occasionally, the bulk of my search is DDG. I've got an Android device tied to Google as well, which I'd very much like to replace with something independent of it. I make use of a few other services, though mostly not logged in. And it's not that Google doesn't provide utility. I just have very serious problems with it (or anyone else) watching every breath I take. |