Not op. I don't trust Google. In a transition period I do use some of their services, but I don't recommend doing that, and I'm slowly migrating away. Except perhaps for using their crawler (as in, having my public content be visible through Google search -- I've recently moved to DDG for my searches).
I also consume some content from youtube, but frankly the UI isn't all that great, and I mostly do it for music -- so I'm moving off that to -- to a lesser degree.
> My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
Fortunately we have some recourse between Replicant and Cyanogen (helped by Google using open licenses, even if their ASOP effort is... not all that friendly towards enabling all users to compile custom distributions for their handsets) -- and most other services can be self-hosted.
There aren't really any viable trusted/open hardware, so the degree of trust we can put in our computing/communication equipment is bounded -- but it's certainly viable to have a much more trustworthy (IMNHO) experience than relying on services designed on a business model that has spying on users as a core business model.
For "cloud files", I'm planning to use http://www.sxdrive.io/ backed by a rented server. Not perfect privacy, but a far cry from just pushing things to a random SaaS. At some point I hope git annex and/or IPFS might be a viable alternative. I don't see much point in using closed source software as an alternative, if the goal is to move to a "less untrustworthy" platform.
Not op. I don't trust Google. In a transition period I do use some of their services, but I don't recommend doing that, and I'm slowly migrating away. Except perhaps for using their crawler (as in, having my public content be visible through Google search -- I've recently moved to DDG for my searches).
I also consume some content from youtube, but frankly the UI isn't all that great, and I mostly do it for music -- so I'm moving off that to -- to a lesser degree.
> My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
Fortunately we have some recourse between Replicant and Cyanogen (helped by Google using open licenses, even if their ASOP effort is... not all that friendly towards enabling all users to compile custom distributions for their handsets) -- and most other services can be self-hosted.
There aren't really any viable trusted/open hardware, so the degree of trust we can put in our computing/communication equipment is bounded -- but it's certainly viable to have a much more trustworthy (IMNHO) experience than relying on services designed on a business model that has spying on users as a core business model.
For "cloud files", I'm planning to use http://www.sxdrive.io/ backed by a rented server. Not perfect privacy, but a far cry from just pushing things to a random SaaS. At some point I hope git annex and/or IPFS might be a viable alternative. I don't see much point in using closed source software as an alternative, if the goal is to move to a "less untrustworthy" platform.