this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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I have a Gmail account that catches/forwards stuff now and again that I signed up for over a decade ago, before I used a password manager and kept track of everything, and YouTube. A Google store line of credit, too, for pixels. Everything else I've migrated to my own website, or my own 'cloud'.
There was a big issue with Google Store/Fi Store a few years ago where devices were being 'lost' in transit, and it ended up being FedEx employees stealing them and resealing the packages. But Google's handling of the situation was absolutely shit, and two years of reading horror stories usually around bf or the holidays, drove me to migrate my account, one service at a time, to somewhere I could actually control and trust - as it is well-known that if you do a chargeback on G, they axe your gPay access, which means you can't buy or pay for anything: drive/photo storage, gOne, devices, apps/music/movies/games/books, app subscriptions, pay your bill on Fi or gDomains... and if it happened to me, I would not sit quietly with no device for weeks or months while G put the blame and suspicion on me. Fuck all that. Chargeback baby, it's not gonna be my problem anymoreeeee~
Took me from an outspoken G fanboy to 'run the fuck away' within 24 months, and all it took was stories of other's being treated like shit and being on the hook for hundreds or a thousand+ dollar devices, over and over, while support did fuck-all and the actual people 'investigating' were not accessible by any means.
This is ofc on top of G axing shit because they feel like it. Run your own mini server, own your data, don't be at the non-existant mercy of a massive soulless corporation.
Same shit happened when the Steam Deck released in 2022 as well. A bunch of them disappeared into FedEx. Fortunately, Valve promptly took care of anyone who was affected.
I have a few accounts for this purpose. I know at least one service I've had forwarded for years.
I jumped ship from most g- products years ago. I really should log into my accounts again and have anything necessary sent directly to my real email.
For a company that seems to want customers, they sure seem to also hate customers.
I know it sounds like a cliche, but you are not Google’s customer. You are a “user” and Google sells users to their customers. Your data and attention are their products.
So when I buy a phone from Google, I'm...? A customer. In my opinion, and probably some legal sense as well. I'm also their user, sure. But if I purchase something I'm a customer.
There is a small sliver of Google that wants you as a customer. Maybe that’s the sliver that makes the Pixel line, but Pixel phones are not Google’s business, Google’s business is acquiring your information and selling it or leveraging it to increase ad revenue. Google is not a hardware company, though they sell hardware. Google is not an entertainment company, though they will sell you movies and music. Google is not a consumer software company, though they do provide software and services targeted at consumers and businesses. Google is an advertising company. If you buy hardware from them, and you like it, that’s great, but they are less concerned about your experience as an end-user than they are about acquiring your data to further their ad sales. If making a quality experience for you as a user Improves the likelihood of acquiring more data, they improve the quality of your experience. But if an improved experience hampers their ability to acquire more revenue through ad sales, they will hamper your experience or shut down a product that isn’t directly increasing their data collection and add sales. See: rolling everything content related into the YouTube brand and increasingly hampering the experience of those who use ad blockers or privacy focused browsers.
You may consider yourself a customer of Google, but until you’re giving them millions of dollars every quarter, you are just a user. Google’s profits from every hardware device they’ve ever sold is just a rounding error on a single quarter of the massive amounts of money they make selling ads.