What I use instead of Google services

I don't say this out of a belief that Apple is pure and Google is evil, and certainly not out of a belief that Apple shows a deep understanding of security (boy, howdy, do they not show a deep understanding of security). I say it out of my understanding of their business models. Basically, Apple makes money from you because you give them money. Google makes money from you by analyzing the data you send through their services.

"If you're not the customer, you're the product" is too glib by half -- both Google and Apple want to make good products that you want to use, and it's certainly in Google's interest to keep their users (i.e., you) happy. They're arguably much better at online services than Apple is. But Google has a vested interest in "reading" your mail, tracking your searches, and so on. Apple not only lacks that interest, it's arguably a competitive advantage for them to not keep any more information about you than they absolutely have to. They've spelled out in the recent past just what they keep, and it's largely "what they absolutely have to." Apple's corporate culture genuinely seems to be supportive of privacy, albeit tempered with profit-driven pragmatism.

This is not an argument that Apple is full of good and wonderful people (I believe the ad copy should be "magical and revolutionary") and that Google is full of terrible people who hate their users. Not at all. And Apple has had a few high-profile privacy biffs where they were collecting information they shouldn't have been, which leads some people to be highly suspicious of them. I get that -- but we're often handing even more data over to Google routinely because that's what they require. That's their corporate culture: their mission is to organize the world's data, and fulfilling that mission requires them to have access to the world's data. All of it.

And, last but not least, none of this is particularly relevant to government snooping except to the degree that the less information is stored on a server that isn't under your control the less information there is to be compromised. (At least compromised via that particular vector.) If you're deeply worried about that you shouldn't be using either Apple or Google.

all services that I keep using, are those that kept me from going somewhere else (gmail replacement?), or those that I'm forced to use (not-removable android apps?)

so seems to me, I'm stuck with google -- at least for now

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