Last time I checked (It's been some time though),
Skydrive's EULA was much
more privacy destroying than Google
Docs EULA (of course, IANAL). Hotmail had
much worse service
and similar targeted advertising, etc etc. It was funny that
at the same time, I was watching on youtube (of all places)
the Microsoft ads
against the gmailman and google docs (see
here and here)
Personally,
I'm migrating my cloud storage to Wuala, that
is, AFAIK, the only cloud storage
provides that both works
on Linux and provides client side encryption for your
data.
There isn't a decent alternative to gmail right now, not at
reasonable
prices (seriously, many for pay email provides
give a much worse product than
gmail). I could rent a
server, install Debian on it, and then set it as my
email
gateway. It would cost me much more, give me worse service,
and require
some of my time to maintain (as unless I kept it
maintained and verified that
it had the latest security
patches, it may end up being less private than
gmail, and
instead part of a botnet, sending spam in my
name)
Sincerely, I personally feel that Google has managed to
be close
to the "do not evil" motto than any of their
competitors. They are light grey
in a dark grey world. I
understand that supporting someone who is slightly evil
is
still supporting evil, but I still find that supporting the
lesser evil is
better than supporting the greater evil. For
those who can not control their
own infrastructure (AKA the
vast majority of users of the internet), Google
offers
services that are WAY ahead of the competition, both in
technical
capability and in respectfulness for the users
rights (Microsoft and Facebook,
for example, as much more
evil than Google - There's a quote that comes to
mind:
"Farewell friend. I was a thousand times more evil than
thou." --
Michael Moorcock) [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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