As far as opening a google checking account goes I think I will be avoiding that one. Diversifying my critical online services might in some sense be a higher security risk, but safer from it all being wiped out in one go.
If I had known back in 2002 what I know now about what Google would become I never would have joined the Gmail beta.
100% agreed. It was cool at the time. Now Google has so fundamentally changed and I don’t trust them with my data anymore, but it is a Herculean task to move everything off Gmail. Literally hundreds of accounts are bound to my Gmail.
I used Dropbox and now MEGA to sync photos off my phone, but I copy all that stuff to my NAS and backups. I use Drive for some things, but I wouldn't be screwed if it went away. I disable almost all the major Google apps on my Android phone and hope to switch out to Lineage + miniG soon.
I use a self hosted TTRss currently (Google Reader was garbage and it dying was really good as I realized what good RSS readers were actually like).
I need to set a reminder to do more regular Facebook exports/backups. No one should be in the situation where a single provider killing your access means you loose a huge chunk of your content. Self hosting has its own problems and yes, a lot of people don't have the knowledge/means/time to do it, but man I'm glad I made it a priority.
My phone number is still on Goolge Hangouts. I need to find a better solution for that as well.
I use it myself :)
With what is going on with big internet players censoring and deplatforming people, why would one trust these people with your money.
and any judge can tear that to shreds if they are sympathetic to the implementation
I've been unable to access my google account for over two years. Their automated processes are never able to confirm my identity, and any humans I do manage to communicate with tell me to use the automated systems.
I don't even care about my dignity any more, I'll beg for it back in person.
Or just go with an email provider that isn't auditing your behaviour
No, outsourced call center with no escalation path doesn't qualify as support for anything but the most basic issues. Google 'support' means bitching on HN, getting upvoted, and having an engineer take notice and actually poke at it.
> the fact that you are spending money tells Google that you are a serious user.
No, it signals that you are reliant on them. This means they can treat you as a second-class citizen from the free users! This recent issue happened to one of my clients (not anyone in this thread), https://support.google.com/voice/thread/3818693?hl=en . Note, paid users can't request a free Google Voice account, have to pay for the same thing on Cloud Voice now.
We had similar issues in the past where we couldn't delegate users from a Google Business panel inside our G Suite domain, we had to maintain personal GMail accounts to add business managers.
I've been a reseller of this shit, deeply regret it. When it works for our clients, it works fine. When it doesn't, we're just as screwed with getting support as anyone else. I switched my primary accounts to Fastmail and O365, and haven't looked back.
I've been meaning to migrate to Exchange/o365, it's in my backlog of projects that I'm procrastinating.
They use free users as beta testers and to see if ideas stick. They can't deploy those to actual customers.
Paying for GSuite doesn't eliminate any of the problems (they'll still ban you, spy on you, have relatively poor support, etc.) and many of the alternative services are simply better anyway.
I manage my company's G Suite account, and their support hasn't impressed me. We were initially unable to set up DKIM. The page to generate the DNS record kept returning a strange error code. I talked to support they were friendly and apologetic, but the issue took months to fix. Every time I followed up I was told they hadn't even heard back from the engineers, which gave me the impression that the support department doesn't have much pull in the organization.