Try turning off any of the incredibly invasive features in Android. If you try to turn off constant location, for example, maps starts throwing all sort of cryptic messages at you. You can't use google play without an account. They want to get you to log into Chrome so they can hook up your desktop searches to your mobile searches and profile you. If you've ever used Ok Google, every word you've ever said to it is recorded and stored in their servers.
Their entire existence revolves around extracting your personal information to sell you things, to profile you and sell that information to others to sell to you.
When you actually look at what they're storing about you Google's shockingly invasive.
They steal traffic and revenue from content creators, and are getting ever more brazen about it because they know the content creators have nowhere else to go. They use their dominance in search to promote their own sub-standard offerings, exactly as Microsoft did years ago. They've systemically attacked and destroyed other aggregators, while at the same time getting those aggregators to normalise that content so they can scrape and steal it in the form of data annotations, etc. to present the data directly to users without redirecting the user to the site that's actually provided the information.
It's not at all a noble cause and it definitely hop, skipped and jumped feet first into evil years ago.
And now they're trying to take over all mobile web traffic with AMP to lock everyone into their search platform.
They're evil coated in Engineer Cool to fool people like you.
EDIT: I do think they're a necessary evil though. If the government stepped in and forced web search to run as a public utility, which sometimes I think it should be, perhaps even at cost, it would decline.
I actually like what they started doing lately, where the answer to my query is extracted from the page, and shown at the top of the results, especially when it's something simple that I just want to double check.
When's sunset today?, what was the name of that movie with surgeon turned spell caster?, how long does it take to go from A to B? Another way to say XYZ?
Too many sites are full of crap, so this saves me a non-trivial amount of time.
There was an article on HN front page recently showing how this feature is at best unreliable. I don't have the link but the story was from a teacher asked about a US president being a member of the ku klux klan.
Their entire existence revolves around extracting your personal information to sell you things, to profile you and sell that information to others to sell to you.
When you actually look at what they're storing about you Google's shockingly invasive.
They steal traffic and revenue from content creators, and are getting ever more brazen about it because they know the content creators have nowhere else to go. They use their dominance in search to promote their own sub-standard offerings, exactly as Microsoft did years ago. They've systemically attacked and destroyed other aggregators, while at the same time getting those aggregators to normalise that content so they can scrape and steal it in the form of data annotations, etc. to present the data directly to users without redirecting the user to the site that's actually provided the information.
It's not at all a noble cause and it definitely hop, skipped and jumped feet first into evil years ago.
And now they're trying to take over all mobile web traffic with AMP to lock everyone into their search platform.
They're evil coated in Engineer Cool to fool people like you.
EDIT: I do think they're a necessary evil though. If the government stepped in and forced web search to run as a public utility, which sometimes I think it should be, perhaps even at cost, it would decline.