this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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In what should be surprising to Noone, Google was just paying lip service about what it stood for from the beginning. When their motto was 'do no evil' it was a lie, they just stopped pretending.
Before Gmail, my old Hotmail account had a whopping 2MB of storage, and others were similarly small. Gmail was a few GB right from the start, forcing the rest to compete and offer more storage.
Making quality stuff for free does not mean they were not doing shady things in the background.
I have no plan to boycott Google or anything, but they were nwver benevolent and usage has always been a tradeoff of data tracking for convenience.
Hard disagree. Back in its early days, Google was genuinely decent. They competed by building better stuff than everyone else, and that's it.
There was no decent free email and no free maps before Google. You used to have to pay hundreds for decent mapping software.
The good old Web 2.0 days, when companies were falling over themselves to provide free APIs and see what people could do with them.
Google started going to shit when they brought out Android and everybody started trying to build walled gardens, and went full evil when that moral vacuum Pichai took over.
Google was collecting your data without informing you from the very beginning. Just because they wrote good software and offered free stuff doesn't mean they weren't doing shady stuff in the background.
I still use Google services, but only because the free part of the trade is currently working in my favor since I block all their ads.