What data from me does Google steal? I don't have a Google account. I can be anonymous at a Starbucks coffee shop and search google for "Paul Graham" and get back useful results. If they coalesce search queries on my home ip address, that's unavoidable and a tradeoff I knowingly make.
>And as an alternative to YouTube, there are free public libraries with similar DIY books
In the last month, I needed to replace a side mirror of a Lexus car and also disassemble a Moen faucet. No, my library does not have the manuals to show how to do it. But youtube did have the videos uploaded by nice people. Both of those procedures had tricky steps that weren't obvious and Youtube saved me hundreds of dollars in fees from car dealerships and plumbers.
The "Google WiFi"?
> I assume they are developing more unethical uses of personal data
Why not make the same assumption about Google? They could jot down the MAC address of your device, and track you all over the place (not that they need to, since you already use Google maps).
Yes but a wifi MAC address is not my real name. I'd be more concerned if Google bought a telecom company like AT&T/Verizon and linked phones' IMEI/ESN hardware numbers to search queries. The IMEI is absolutely linked to a real identity because it's the billing address of the person paying for the phone.
The MAC address correlation seems more useful for targeted ads rather than abusing personal real names data like Equifax & Facebook.
The only reason to use Facebook instead of anything else is the amount of people on there, it's not unique and also by far not better than other similar products.
It's hard to say the same about Googles services.
I've been using DuckDuckGo lately and haven't noticed a drop in search quality.
But I've always maxed out Google privacy settings so maybe I don't know what I'm missing.