If your employer forced you to either use Google or Microsoft or some other tech company (Apple, Samsung, etc.) what would be a better choice?
Which company is more compliant in terms of privacy or generally better and why?
I was thinking about Google since there were new regulations enforced by government and at least I don’t have to pay for Google Docs, unlike Microsoft where I pay and I’m still spied on.
Not going to lie; Google is largely not as bad. I don’t see Google being as intrusive as they are just simply BIG. This does have some concerns to be worried about; and it can be seriously bad for your privacy. I don’t notice any significant privacy issues; particularly since the worst of Google’s offenses can be either blocked or mitigated somehow. They rely on your inaction, and most of the time do not try to override your actions to preserve privacy. Yes there are some exceptions; like with Youtube attempting to force users to watch ads; but these are few and far between when you look into all of Google services in general.
Most of the time if you’re using a paid “Workspace” account; there’s even a complete lack of ads…as all your usage is paid for anyways.
Google is intrusive. The story where Google literally send police on a dad that had stored photos of his son on Google Drive that he meant to show to a doctor or countless stories with scanning emails. For the first one a mitigation could be to encrypt files before hand, but it’s not at all convenient for regular people that want to have their photos automatically synced and backed up. For the second one, you could also encrypt emails beforehand using PGP, but yeah, pretty much no one does that. And none of this potential mitigations make Google any less intrusive. And I think I could even argue they allow themselves to be like that because they are this big.
That being said, I’m not arguing that Google Workspace, that integrate tools, storage and emails for way cheaper that other alternatives, is not great value for companies. But it’s still Google, so no matter how you look at it, it’s still bad choice for privacy. But the other choice being Microsoft, there’s hardly a better way.