Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
There’s alternatives for all of that, why are you stuck on Google? You could create a new email on a different site or host your own and there would be no differences between it and a gmail account. For photo services you could build a nas that has auto backup and never pay a penny again to Google. I understand they are pervasive in the modern world so it’s hard to escape but there’s always options.
for photos there is immich. they also have a guide to import photos from gphotos.
context: immich is a selfhosted app, with fully functional web view and app. the app can do background backups. there are ML jobs configurable on the server to search anything, and have faces of people aggregated.
I can move away from google but I have a lot of sites that I need to swap to using a different email address. Slowly working on it.
Yeah I feel you that was me for a while. Eventually I said enough was enough and every time I came across a service that was linked to my Gmail I unlinked and made a new account. It doesn’t have to be all at once, slow and steady wins the race too.