You don’t have full control of your data. Google isn’t a some Mecca of freedom, it’s an advertising company.

Google is a company providing me a service I pay for, with a contract I signed.

Do you think my data would be safer if I used UnknownCalMailCompany Inc, a company with zero track record in terms of privacy, safety, or long-term viability?

What's wrong with a flip calendar or a moleskin diary? Color me old-school but why does every single thing, especially your most private things need to be online?

Why do you care how I organise my life?

I value being able to ctrl+f my thousands of meetings across several years.

I guess since your only two options are, for some reason, "Google" and "UnknownCalMailCompany Inc," Google seems to be the choice for you.

Fortunately, many of the rest of us live in the real world where there are more than just those two options.

What’s your alternative? You’re not suggesting any.

And yes concretely, the two options if you want cloud are either the usual suspects (ms google apple), or unproven companies.

I've used Fastmail for over 10 years now, but they may not be "proven" enough to be a True Scotsman.

Google has 50x more people working in security than fastmail has total employees.

Good job moving those goalposts.

Thanks, you too.

I’m sorry but yeah, if you want a concrete solution that is on par with what google offers in terms of privacy and security, you can’t go with a random company and everything I said before stands. And in this scenario, fastmail IS a random company no matter how long you’ve used them.

I don’t understand how you define privacy - your data is used to sell adverts. Is that not part of the equation?

None of my data is used to sell adverts. You seem to completely miss that I’m using google workspace. I have a contract with google, I’m not using free shit.

Even those whose risk assessment leads to them not wanting to give Google their personal data should be able to acknowledge that Google's pretty good at not leaking user data onto the Internet.

To the extent that they make their money from user data, their advantage is in keeping the underlying data for themselves, not in giving it to other people.

(I use a fair amount of Google tech, including paying for hardware and services, but I won't use their search engine or browser)

Sounds like you’ve just chosen to lock yourself into a different vendor, only one that integrates less elegantly with your device.

There is no vendor lockin with Google when it comes to hardware, the services even work in a browser

> There is no vendor lockin with Google when it comes to hardware

That’s not intentional though, it’s just that their hardware hasn’t been that successful.

I don't think you understand the definition of lock-in.