We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
I’m not sure failing is the right word, it’s just that privacy is not prioritized. They don’t sell your data or sell ads, but they are based in Australia which has very anti-privacy laws regarding govt access to user data that they presumably comply with. They don’t offer built-in message encryption, and they don’t have anonymous signups. I’ve also read a few anecdotes about customer service being able to access your messages or at least certain configuration details about your account that you expect to be private.
All that said, this I’ve been using them for years now. They offer a better user experience than something like Proton without data mining and ads. I’m not sure there’s a best-of-all-worlds option.
Good to know about other users experiences. I’ve been with them for 20 years and apart from some downtime in the early years they have been solid. I don’t really have an issue to what their staff can access, it whether there had been any data breaches that I was unaware of. I’ve not looked at Proton but I was curious enough to look at Tutanota based on Germany as they have a presence on the fediverse.