Why I’m Worried About Google

Firefox.

It’s the closing paragraph that’s the important bit:

In the end, this is why I’m moving away from the Google ecosystem. If nothing else works, then at least I can vote with my feet—or my fingertips.

Google have set their path, so it will take effort for them to deviate from it. The best way to show them that the effort is worthwhile is to affect their bottom line by reducing your use of their services. And maybe you’ll find that the competitors are still there and pretty good.

Anything that maintains the double digit year-over-year percentage gains in revenue that they've enjoyed for years.

Their revenue growth has outpaced user/activity growth for some time.

My guess? An unholy alliance between government and private industry which allows each to get away with things the other can't. For example, squelching free speech can be done by a private company with practically no impediments. Meanwhile, governments want to eavesdrop on everyone and develop dossiers on everyone because that's how you control people. Corporations are doing that for marketing purposes, but the intelligence agencies are right there in that data now, too.

Google always had a CIA connection. You do the math on how this works and what it means now that you can see it all unfolding like everyone else can. They want total control over your mind and barring that, they want total control over your behavior one way or another.

What can't corporations do? They can't force people to buy their products or pay their bills. Governments can, though. It's actually the only tool in the box. Corporations would love to gather and coalesce the information and then have the jackboots do the violent stuff to suppress and subjugate. The very definition of fascism.

Well... regarding what Mozilla did with Cliqz, I'm sure Google won't be sending my user data to third parties, which Mozilla did. So maybe Chrome is better than Firefox in that regard.