I’m really amazed at all of the people working hard to make Google-free this and self hosted that. Moreover, Google has over time been a really frustrating service as they kill off products or reduce functionality and user controls to force their agenda, so I’m always looking for ways to export my own data for safe keeping, or put a different user interface on their apis.
But, I also kind of like living in this super connected hive future. I’m not sure you can get the social side of things without taking some privacy risks. If you’re going to risk it, Google is one big risk vs. many small ones. FOSS sounds great if people are really checking, and checking the dependencies, and checking again each month as things are updated. But nothing’s guaranteed and a rooted device not using Play services gives greater exposure to bad actors other than Google. What are these services you pay for that don’t sell your data and how do you know? As far as I can tell every business everywhere has figured out they can get more money from other businesses than from subscribers so customer as product is attractive to all of them.
I think it’s a case of, yes I want people to be watching this and letting us know the danger and fighting the erosion of privacy and consumer rights, but also you’re never really much better protected than everyone as a whole, so the more interesting solutions are going to be how to know, regulate, and mitigate impact of the major players, not just saying “stop using them”.