Google has the reputation for being the big evil tech giant that everyone should avoid. It was well earned decades ago, but there are much bigger evils now like Microsoft and Amazon who get disproportionately less attention.
When Google employees protest and petition Google taking a contract from some evil activity like ICE, weapons production, or fossil fuels, Google reacts and often renounces such contracts. The rationale is sometimes Google’s AI principles – principles that don’t even exist at other tech giants.
When Amazon and Microsoft employees petition and protest, they’re told to piss off and get threatened with sacking. And Microsoft also has the lion’s share of the more evil gov contracts. This article is ram-packed with dense information about these companies and Google is clearly a lesser of evils.
I still boycott Google, but so many fools leave Google for DuckDuckGo thinking that’s an ethical improvement. DDG is a bigger evil than Google because DDG feeds Amazon & Microsoft. There are plenty of decent search engines that don’t rely on either (e.g. Metager, Mojeek and Ekoru).
The problem is this “deGoogle” movement. There is a deGoogle movement and not a deAmazon or deMicrosoft movement. It’s all relative and “deGoogle” sends the wrong message. It actually helps Google’s more harmful competitors.
One devil at a time. Google owns the internet and biggest part of the mobile ecosystem, so if you care about your privacy it needs to go first. Microsoft was easy to avoid compared to Google - not so much since they are buying out the dev ecosystem (GitHub, npm) now. Amazon even easier for personal use but if you start caring who they host… at least companies have alternatives on this market if they are not yet locked-in. When it comes to search there are only handful of indexes of the internet: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Mojek. If you don’t use Google’s index you need to use one of the other three and Microsoft has probably the best of them. I agree that “deGoogle” is quite successful campaign, we need more. But ultimately you are fighting with capitalism, greed, governments eager to regulate the internet (through this companies) and also the way web works (try indexing it! or make your own browser, or regulate it without big corpo).