i don’t want to offend anyone, but some open source/privacy enthusiasts dislike google, but why?? google has made chromium, android, etc and most of the things they do are open source, and not only that, they also support creative commons media or public domain. i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you. i love google personally because of their commitment to open source software.
“but they would never do anything bad to you”
Oof, can I get this in writing? I, a massive company beholden to no one, promise to never evar backstab my loyal customers, pinky swear.
One more thing concerning the ‘open source’. Most things Google does aren’t open.
You mentioned Chromium. I don’t think it would have become the most used browser platform if it hadn’t been open. So I’m not sure if it’s a gift or marketing decision. They kinda use it to spy on people/track behaviour. And push the web-standards they like. It’s part of their strategy to retain control over every part along the way and dominate the internet. From servers, to network infrastructure to the end users device and even their software that displays the webpages.
With Android they take extra care to move more and more things into their propretary Google Services. I think the Calendar is kinda unmaintained, the ASOP keyboard is very bare. Half the Apps don’t work without Play Services, Push Notifications are an important part of todays world but proprietary. The camera doesn’t even have half it’s capabilities and the Play Store is set to assert control over the ecosystem. Contactless Payment doesn’t work with open source, …
With Google, their open source always comes with strings attached. They’re not doing it for your benefit.
If you compare it for example with Meta, they just give away PyTorch, React and their Llama2 models because they can and it’ beneficial to them. I don’t see too many strings attached there.
But Google has a few of those, too. TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Gerrit, Angular and the two or three programming languages.
If you like being dominated and the future of the web being shaped for you by a single company, or your wants and needs align well with their motives, I don’t have any objections, though.
I love open source too, but this:
i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you.
Is just super problematic. I appreciate the enthusiasm for open source, but google is a monopoly actively involved in making the internet worse in order to profit from it. They do this by leveraging your personal information, and that’s bad.
they will give incredibly private information to the highest bidder
Because their main purpose is to collect as much personal information as they can from their users and sell it to anyone willing to pay for it.
Because they are an advertising company.
With all that been said here, they also killed xmpp with hangout, so they’re not friendly to Foss at all.
I’m not sure where you were during the time of the Snowden revelations, but I invite you to look it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures
A few things to go down the rabbit hole on:
- drag net surveillance
- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
- Patriot Act
- Geo-fencing
- Five Eyes
- PRISM
- Cambridge Analytica
- Chilling Effect
Basically, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and host of other American companies collect a lot of information about citizens. So much in fact that the US government decided it was good to have access to it. That, and many other things, were revealed by Snowden and other patriots.
The information has been sold to insurance companies to modify their premium for certain groups of the population. It is used to profile minorities, track activists, intimidate political opponents, fund wars abroad, and so much more. It even affects how people vote, which means that companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have tangible influence on elections.
When the Nazis invaded countries, they used the information gathered by governments to find the Jews, and we know what happened afterwards. It was Jews then, but what if you happen to be the group targeted in the next upheaval?Google (and companies like it), also like to use their power to snuff out competition which slows down innovation.
Black and white
The world isn’t black and white. Google does amazing things, good things, but it also does many bad things. For those who care, the bad things outweigh the good. It’s like drug cartels in Brazil, Colombia, and other countries: they build schools, enforce their own laws, invest in infrastructure, have political candidates, and sometimes even a form of democracy, but in the background, they violently murder rivals, fight fierce battles with law enforcement, assassinate political opponents, facilitate addiction, employ children and teens, and so much more.
If you didn’t know about the bad things drug cartels do, would you support them and love them like you do Google?
