I, I assume like a lot of people, have really shifted my opinion on google in the recent years. The product has begun to decline. Google has too much power. Most of all, I’m terrified that I will get banned from Google and lose my passwords and a good portion of my online identity. I don’t use any mainstream social media except hacker news, lemmy, and linked in (i guess…) so losing my google account would be devastating.
The state of anti monopoly legislation in the US is sad. The Instagram buyout was probably a deal that shouldn’t have gone through. Social media companies need to have some sort of rules that bar them from cloning each other’s products. One issue though is that Youtube (for example) wasn’t profitable for the first decade and a half of its existence. Youtube began turning profit like 5 years ago. I think a lot of these platforms aren’t viable for such a long period of time that they really really benefit from being a part of a larger company.
This isn’t really related to the political discussion, but I wanted to mention that it might be worth making a bitwarden account and just backing up your current passwords there if you’re concerned about them being all in one place. When I switched to bitwarden so my password manager wouldn’t lock me into using chrome as my mobile browser, I didn’t anticipate how easy it would be to copy all my passwords into bitwarden. I don’t remember what the process was like, but you might even just be able to export your google passwords without using bitwarden at all, though they may not be in a helpful format- it might be worth looking into :)
I, I assume like a lot of people, have really shifted my opinion on google in the recent years. The product has begun to decline. Google has too much power. Most of all, I’m terrified that I will get banned from Google and lose my passwords and a good portion of my online identity. I don’t use any mainstream social media except hacker news, lemmy, and linked in (i guess…) so losing my google account would be devastating.
The state of anti monopoly legislation in the US is sad. The Instagram buyout was probably a deal that shouldn’t have gone through. Social media companies need to have some sort of rules that bar them from cloning each other’s products. One issue though is that Youtube (for example) wasn’t profitable for the first decade and a half of its existence. Youtube began turning profit like 5 years ago. I think a lot of these platforms aren’t viable for such a long period of time that they really really benefit from being a part of a larger company.
This isn’t really related to the political discussion, but I wanted to mention that it might be worth making a bitwarden account and just backing up your current passwords there if you’re concerned about them being all in one place. When I switched to bitwarden so my password manager wouldn’t lock me into using chrome as my mobile browser, I didn’t anticipate how easy it would be to copy all my passwords into bitwarden. I don’t remember what the process was like, but you might even just be able to export your google passwords without using bitwarden at all, though they may not be in a helpful format- it might be worth looking into :)