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Eh. I had Google hosting my family's email for a long time (I had one of those grandfathered free custom domain setups). It wasn't bad and it was free (!), bu

by jmull 4y ago

Eh. I had Google hosting my family's email for a long time (I had one of those grandfathered free custom domain setups). It wasn't bad and it was free (!), but: - Google threatened to cut me off. - Wife's account needed attention to keep it under the disk space quotas. - Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content). - It was free. (Yes, I list that as both a positive and a negative, since it means they have no real responsibility to me.) I migrated to fastmail and it's every bit as good as gmail with none of the downsides, for a small $/month. Sure, Google backed down from terminating my service, but that reminded me not to rely on "free" services -- free is always limited. So I thought, "Fair enough, time to pay." I considered Google, but they did not make the cut.

jsnell 4y ago
> Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content As far as I know, email content was never used for ad targeting on any iteration of Workspace/Gsuite/Google Apps for Your Domain/etc. (And it hasn't been used for consumer gmail for many years either.)
- jmull 4y ago
  How would you know though? Not that the details of how they use a specific information stream are all that important (if they aren't using one it's just because they've got something else better). The fundamental problem is that their interests are fairly heavily misaligned with mine. They want to make money by effectively mining my information and I don't like that and find it creepy.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    Because they've made public statements to this effect, including in the privacy policy. Why trust those statements? Because lying would be a very bad idea. The lies would be revealed very quickly (e.g. via whistleblowers). The outcome would be expensive civil lawsuits, probably billions in fines, and a loss of trust in their $20 billion / year cloud business.

by jmull 4y ago

jsnell 4y ago

> Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content As far as I know, email content was never used for ad targeting on any iteration of Workspace/Gsuite/Google Apps for Your Domain/etc. (And it hasn't been used for consumer gmail for many years either.)

jmull 4y ago
How would you know though? Not that the details of how they use a specific information stream are all that important (if they aren't using one it's just because they've got something else better). The fundamental problem is that their interests are fairly heavily misaligned with mine. They want to make money by effectively mining my information and I don't like that and find it creepy.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Because they've made public statements to this effect, including in the privacy policy. Why trust those statements? Because lying would be a very bad idea. The lies would be revealed very quickly (e.g. via whistleblowers). The outcome would be expensive civil lawsuits, probably billions in fines, and a loss of trust in their $20 billion / year cloud business.