Some Google employees made a website. I would summarize their three objections as follows:
1) helping out border patrol and immigration with data
2) helping the fossil fuel industry with machine learning
3) doing (and publicly asking for more) mercenary work
I think these are also valid reasons to leave Google as a customer.
@mplammers leaving Google is easier said than done. I've attempted several things to get rid of Google and I've found it almost impossible. If you have any insight to share, that would be great.
@JamieLBarnett @mplammers I believe I'm free of Google but it's hard to answer you without knowing which #Google service you use that you believe is irreplaceable.
@JamieLBarnett @mplammers i #degoogle'd my phone without issues.. at least, without unexpected issues. No idea why you would have data loss. The only apps that should fail are those that rely on google services. OTOH I'm not a heavy phone user so I may have issues that aren't triggered. Apps should come from #fdroid.
@mplammers @JamieLBarnett BTW, #Signal has lots of privacy issues (see this famous thread: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/779). And DDG only pretends to be good for privacy; searxes.eu.org is better for privacy.
@resist1984 @mplammers
Hi. Thanks for responding. It's not that the services are irreplaceable, it's that I can't get Google out of my phone. I've disabled every function I could and it actually caused many issues with loss of data, apps not working, etc. I use Signal, Protonmail, Tor, Firefox, Duck Duck Go, etc. I keep trying to change my YouTube away from Google and I haven't been able to. I don't want to give them my new email address.