Google runs their own ad network (and it's generally an honest and upstanding ad network, unlike some others). All that data they collect on you is for their own internal consumption. If they ever sell their data, they are giving their competitive advantage to their competitors - not going to happen. Other companies are also logging and collecting every scrap of data that they can, but they aren't consumers of that data. It just gets sold to the highest bidder. I'd much rather have google tracking me and know where that data is going, than have somebody else tracking me and never knowing where that data is going to end up.
Unless you happen to be a small guy and fall on the wrong side of their political beliefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5438797
That's neither fair nor accurate. Tom's running his own email server, which is a huge chunk of privacy right there.
Distributing your identity across multiple companies means, at the very least, they've got to do more work to create a unified profile of you. One of my major beefs against Google, and a reason why I separate my own use of the company's products among different (or no) identities and browsers is that its usage profile is drawn across such a wide range of products. Google knows my search, my social, my video viewing, my maps usage, my email reading habits, and more. That's ... fine until the regime changes ... or gets pissed off at me.
I've started thinking of ways in which the FreedomBox (plug-based cheap computers running Debian and largely self-configuring software tools) could take the place of most of the present generation of cloud computing. The compute power and raw storage are effectively trivial requirements to meet. Distributed storage for redundancy slightly harder, but still very doable. The real key is bringing down the configuration and management elements to the level that Joe and Jane Average Internet User can just plug and play. And I suspect it's not too far off. A few years, but not much more.
Whether or not people will buy into it is another matter, but as with Linux, if enough do, it won't matter, and even if this means that small hosted services exist, the idea of separating out and federalizing people's data would be an advantage over the present regime.
Search: Push (possible win with DuckDuckGo booleans, possible loss with Craigslist search)
Mail: Push (mainly using own server, Yahoo vs Gmail not an issue).
Maps: Acceptable, but significant loss. ("Mapquest is ok. Yahoo! Maps are my go-to" and "Yahoo! Maps UI isn't very good, but the maps are quite usable").
Music and Videos: Loss. Spotify covers music, Vimeo and DuckDuckGo search covers some (most?) videos, but the overall process described is pretty painful. Many alternative video sites are likely tracking him as well (despite attempted countermeasures).
Images: Push. Happy using private Flickr and Shutterfly, no noted advantages.
Social Networking: Push. Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter (occasional) cover most things. No indication of whether or not he reasonably matched his 3000 Google+ relationships.
GPS: Not used.
Google Translation: Loss. "Babelfish is ok. Others do well, too. None are as good as I would like."
Apps: Not used / push.
So... depending on whether you break out Music and Videos and whether you count Apps, that's three clear losses out of 7-9 services, with no obvious win (other than the divorce itself). To me that doesn't look very good.
It's weird because product-for-product, Google has great web services but their issue is that so much of the UI is dedicated to advertising that it makes the overall experience worse. Here.com is owned by Nokia but there is no indication of that apart from a tiny copyright notice in the bottom left of the page.
Is the internet trying to teach us a timely lesson with this broken site? :p (semi-tongue-in-cheek)
What we need is a way to be able to sell server "apps" in a way where they can be monetized. Right now it's really hard to sell the application without providing the service as well because they're too hard to install.
In addition to the personal tracking, I really agree with the following quote from the OP:
"I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to the detriment of us all."
And punting on GPS with a simple "Oh, I prefer paper maps" is a trifle disingenuous.
Gmail -> business hushmail
Google Maps -> Bing Maps
GPS -> Use an actual GPS device or one of the iOS/Android maps that download to your phone.
GChat -> This one is tricky due to being subject to network effects. Without getting into hyper nerdy jabber or private IRC nonsense, I'd say just use OTR and be done with it if the point is privacy.
Google+ -> meet people for lunch
Docs -> Zoho/Microsoft Office/Open Office.org/LibreOffice
Google Drive -> Dropbox, add encryption if you want. There are libre alternatives if you want to set up your own fileserver with automagic sync. I'm trying not to get too far out into left-field on this list.
See: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-privacy-change-google-att...
And it should go without saying that you get your own domain name for the accounts so that you can switch providers easily.
Sure I could replace drive with Dropbox but it is twice as expensive. I could replace GMail with Outlook or Yahoo but so many of my colleagues, contacts and friends get in touch with me through google talk. Plus none really compare to GMail in terms of ease of use (although I've really started to dislike the new compose feature).
The point is the individual pieces are probably replaceable, but no one even comes close to having such a cohesive, integrated set of products. At this point the best I can do is make sure I have an offline copy of as much as possible and hope for the best.
No matter how ahead-of-the-curve google innovation can be, I just don't think it's worth it to sell our souls to one company for the sake of convenience.
| finding good clients for Linux has been
| more challenging than I expected
It doesn't make much sense that someone would go through all this effort to ditch a company and still use one of their flagship products. That would be like me swearing off Apple and still carrying an iPhone.
Instead of giving away your personal information to one place, why not give it away to 10 or 20 places?
I think it makes sense to use the best tool for the job. At least when it comes to email, maps, and search I would argue that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google are the best services by a long shot.
Not to knock Duck Duck Go, but it would drive me crazy to have to do multiple searches or go through more results just to find something I could find on Google in the first half of the first page of results.
Sure I would get used to it eventually, but it's not worth losing my own time/productivity over.
It might be easy to just "switch" one day away from Gmail, but it could easily be weeks and months of manually unsubscribing/notifying/etc providers of the new address to use.
I use it with Postfix, using Dovecot's virtual domain support to host various domains/mailboxes. Dovecot with sieve sorts mail server side. It's fast and works incredibly well.
Admittedly, I'm only changing one taskmaster for another, but overall the change has been good, like an upgrade.