Not OK, Google

At that point I turned it on but deleted* the search history each day, until such point as they changed the delete controls to be more of a nuisance.

I now use DuckDuckGo and an iPhone instead.

* Or so their site claims.

A close friend is a longtime professional software developer. Always interested in mobile. We used to have extensive discussions bout why I preferred carrying a small flip-top notepad and a pen vs a phone or tablet or whatever with a stylus (many have come and gone over the years). In the use-case scenarios I put forward (small lists, secure disposal, privacy, 'battery life') my little notebook frequently was the best approach for me. He disagreed, but that was the point of chatting about our views.

Where technology has failed us most is in the utterly stagnant evolution and maturation of secure private networks. The following is a utopian notion, but had private networks seen as much R&D as the public clouds, they would be significantly less cumbersome than today's clunky VPNs. Imagine all of your devices collaborate directly with one another and with you on your own secure private network—no central cloud servers needed. Your personal assistant is software running on a computer you own rather than a third-party's centralized server.

I still feel this ideal will eventually be realized, but for the time being, no large technology company is willing to take the necessary risks to buck the trend of centralization.

The biggest fiction propped by up centralization and cloud proponents is that it would be impossible to provide the kind of utility seen in Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, et al without a big public cloud. A modern desktop computer has ample computational capability to convert voice to text, parse various phrases, manage a calendar, and look up restaurants on Yelp. Absolutely nothing the public clouds provide strikes me as something my own computer would struggle to do (to be clear, I would expect a local agent would be able to reach out to third-party sites such as Yelp or Amazon at your command in order to execute your desires, but they would do so directly, not via an intermediary).

A few years back, when Microsoft was at the beginning of its Nadella renaissance, I had hoped it would be the first technology titan to disintermediate the cloud and make approachable and easily-managed personal private networks a thing. Microsoft's legacy of focusing on desktop computers would have made it well-situated to reaffirm your home computer as an important fixture in your multi-device life. They could have co-opted Sun's old bad tagline: "Your network is your computer." But they elected to just follow the now-conventional public cloud model, reducing everyone's quite-powerful home computer to yet another terminal of centralized cloud services. Disappointing, but I think it is ultimately their loss. I suspect a lot of money is on the table for someone to realize a coherent easy-to-use multi-device private network model that respects consumer privacy by executing its principal computation within the network.

Instead I get the current evolution. I want a 3rd party.

The same thing comes to my every day of usage, I'm still on win 7, and short of leaving Linux(yes I should have already), I can't upgrade without becoming a product.

I want what we all imagined and dreamt of, and I pay for it.

What I won't do, is become a product.

Instead I'm stuck with multiple fake accounts on Gmail, using a pseudonym on everything(including programming contract sites such as upwork), just to keep some semi iota of privacy, and to enjoy the benefits of what we all want.

Imho we need a new major party to emerge, that will charge an initial fee(like windows 7), and let us do what we want with those services(with caveats of course).

But I fear we won't get that anymore.