Is it time to start stepping away from Google products?

It's been all over the news about how Google Gemini AI has been intentionally programmed to remove white people from history and replace them with black, Asian, Indian, and whatever other demographic you can imagine that isn't white from everything that it does. Personally, I don't use AI at all unless I am playing around with having it write me a funny "quote" to send to a friend in some sort of messaging app. I don't really have powerful computers and some of the fun things that you can do with AI seem like something that is for people who spend a lot more time on their computers than I care to.

I was a little pissed off that a company like Google would do something like this though and I think that it is probably a good time for us all to at least investigate alternatives to their products and services.

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Google has apologized for the AI being programmed the way that it is but honestly, the fact that they did something like this in the first place is just a sign of how they are so big that they apparently feel that they can do whatever they want with impunity and that isn't a good thing.

Personally, I stopped using Google as a search engine years ago and their browser was always the slowest one of all the ones I toyed with so I never got on board that. However, I think I am in the majority when I say that I have held on to a Gmail account for as long as I can remember. The other day I took a step to change that and I think that others should do the same. Even if you don't really care about the Gemini scandal I think there is a real danger in one company controlling too much of something as all encompassing as internet use and that is where Google kind of stands right now.

I would recommend that you sign up for a free Protonmail account and if you enjoy it, maybe even investigate some of their other offerings that you have to pay for such as their very nice VPN service.

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I'm not one of those people that worries all that much about email getting hacked, but apparently Protonmail has much better security as far as that is concerned particularly if you are sending the email to another Protonmail account. I haven't read that much into it but that is the general consensus. The claim is that popular email services like Gmail scan your emails for targeted advertising and that is actually in the TOS that nobody reads. Protonmail doesn't do this. They claim they are unable to do this even if they wanted to because of the encryption technology used. So that's good, right?

Protonmail has apparently read the writing on the wall because they have a feature specifically designed to forward your Gmail to your Protonmail account as well.

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Now 500 MB isn't a lot but I think that most people do a lot of their communication via some sort of messenger these days anyway so at least for me, it is more than enough. This somewhat limited storage could be a limitation for a lot of people but if you end up paying for their very good VPN like I did, this can be increased along with it and it is included in the package. I just haven't activated it yet because I really don't think I am going to need it. It's there for me to add on if I ever do need it and there is no time limit on when you can apply it as far as I can tell. For me, I don't see myself ever needing more than 500MB since I rarely use email to communicate anyway.

Thus far I have been very happy with the Protonmail interface and really everything about it. If you are the kind of person that likes to have many different email addresses for whatever reason such as having a "dummy" account for websites that insist you put in an email address, P-mail has the ability to quickly swap between accounts as well.

I think that it would be a good idea if we, the world, cut the cord a bit as far as Google is concerned because honestly, they have too much of the market and this needs to change. In the coming weeks I am going to be investigating alternatives to most Google products and posting what I think about them here.

In the meantime you can sign up for a free Protonmail account here