So it turns out that Google+ is going to live on a nice farm in Petaluma where it can run and jump and play with Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Orkut, iGoogle, Google Fiber, Google Wi-fi…only thing is, the reason it’s getting murked is because it was leaking data for years, and Google covered it up rather than fix it.
This is surprising not at all. Shall we go back in time nine years?
Microsoft had your desktop. Google has your data. And the only thing standing between your data and a reign of terror that would make Bill Gates look like Winnie the Pooh is the vague promise “Don’t be evil.” Is Google evil? No more than any other company. Certainly not more evil than Apple, for instance. Far less evil than your typical cable company or baby Bell. But knowing what the world is like, and knowing where virtue ranks among American business metrics, are you prepared to hang your online livelihood on “don’t be evil”?
Well, if you had any hopes that the Beast of Mountain View was a safer or more responsible custodian of your personal information than Facebook, abandon them. At either end of 101 between Routes 84 and 85 lies a company that makes its wealth through the harvesting and resale of your personal data, which they will gladly whore around to all and sundry with no concern for the impact this has on your personal safety or risk of identity theft or misuse of personal information.
And the most telling thing is that rather than fix the problem, rather than take responsibility for what they did wrong and try to remediate it, Google’s response is to shut the product down outright. As with all things, once it doesn’t work or has flaws or just can’t be turned into another money-spinning data crop, Google lives by the ethos “if at first you don’t succeed, quit.” And so far, they’ve gotten away with it, not least because people have painted Facebook as the devil of Silly Con Valley without seeming to notice that Google does the exact same thing.
Buy an iPhone. Dump WhatsApp for Signal. Share your pics in the group chat instead of Insta. Use ProtonMail instead of Gmail, use Vimeo to post what you would have put on YouTube, delete Chrome from EVERY DEVICE YOU OWN, do your web searches in DuckDuckGo and keep all the tracker blockers enabled in iOS 12.
Only a moron trusts Google any more.