Technology

I did/do. I share gdrive stuff with friends and family for all sorts of reasons, bluntly, I don't trust most cloud storage providers, and I certainly don't trust them any more than I trust the big G... Not saying that the big G is without flaws, but I haven't seen any major data breaches from them that were handled poorly, unlike a lot of other providers. Meanwhile, they're one of the biggest online entities, making them prone to getting attacked.

As far as security of my data from bad actors on the internet, the big G seems to have it where it counts for security....

There's obvious problems with them willingly sharing data to other organizations, but that's a risk regardless of who you give your data to.

And please don't start with the self hosted stuff. I can't even begin to describe how tired I am with trying to get people to use anything that's didn't ship pre-installed on their phone. I have a handful of friends that could navigate a FOSS file sharing system, and a large number more that would need to have their hands held through the whole process every time they accessed it, which bluntly, I don't have time for.

Plus, everyone in my circles already has a Google account for one reason or another, so they already have some idea how to use it, and access controls are made easy by that fact. I really don't want to have to set each of them up with an account and guide them through the process of accessing it and everything. They are used to Google drive at this point and I'm not going to change that, since it took so much damned effort to get to a point where it's actually functional for everyone.

I get stuff like spreadsheets shared with family where they can input stuff like their bills and stuff (for tracking payments and trends), and sharing pictures and video, to keeping backups of important files. I can build a FOSS file depot for that, but once I move everyone over to it, I need to spend even more making it redundant with offsite backups and shit.....

I'd rather pay the $5/mo and just not worry about it. I'm on one of the lowest "Google one" plans and I don't see a reason to upgrade or change what I'm doing. I work in IT, I manage enough already, both for my work, myself and for my family. I don't want to add to that burden because "big G bad".

Most of the people around me have long ago given all their data to Google, Meta, Twitter, tiktok, etc (or some combination of those). I don't think they care about having more data in the "cloud".

Plus, I can share my Google one benefits like YouTube premium, and YouTube music, with my family, so individually it works out to maybe a bit more than a dollar each per month. It's truly not a bad deal.