I'm sure you're not the only one he's met who doesn't like Google. He just doesn't care. It's nice that he bothered to send you the questions separately... some might've seen that as a yellow flag, like "I bet this candidate's gonna be a pain. Wonder what else they won't want us to use."
All I'm saying is you do you, but don't expect others to follow. There are plenty of evil companies in the world, and it's not like there's a clear moral superiority between Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They're not offensive to most people. They're just more banally evil companies in an ocean of even eviler companies. Tis life under capitalism.
I would suggest reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
My biggest worry about Google is just that they've stopped innovating and are in rapid decline, enshittifying everything while also facing regulatory actions. It might not be around in its current form much longer. That scares me only because it's a huge PITA to have to move everything off of Gmail and GDrive and Android and Chrome and have to find replacements for every minor service they offer. Ugh. The privacy angle just gets a big shrug, as it does for millions of other users.
For every person I know who goes out of their way to de-googify their life (there's a couple), dozens of others just don't care at all. It's not what we spend brain time on.
Guess what, every company we interact with on a daily basis is out to exploit us and doesn't have our best interests at heart. The car companies and fossil fuel companies are actively killing us, the food growers use dangerous chemicals, Target and Costco sell us mass produced crap... shrug. It's not just surveillance capitalism, it's everyday capitalism.
Maybe the full book has more substance, but it's not a subject I find all that interesting (hence the don't care).
Fortunately 30 years ago people didn't have that view, and that's why we have things like the web and Linux.
Alas nobody cares about freedom now.
This doesn't work. Appealing to people's emotions about monopolies or privacy does not work. This is a fact at this point; it has been tried repeatedly, and here we are.
Anyone who has been around for some time and tried hard to support multiple browsers in the past got burned out. Web developers want to develop; most don't want to be freedom fighters, and rightfully so.
The closer this is fixed at the source, the better chance it has to work. Unfortunately, the source seems to be outside the browser's engine internals and other interesting technical areas. I'd argue it's in the human/government sphere, where things are slow and require a lot of energy... who's willing to do that?
I'm a nerd. I like to work with technical things. I like to ignore humans and play with machines. None of that will fix the browser monopoly situation (or Firefox/Opera/Brave/etc wouldn't have single-digit market share [0]).
> Anyone who has been around for some time and tried hard to support multiple browsers in the past got burned out. Web developers want to develop; most don't want to be freedom fighters, and rightfully so.
Heard exactly the same thing from the Microsoft fanboys about IE6 15-20 years ago
True story: A few months ago I applied for a job. The hiring manager sent a link asking me to fill out a form, a Google form. They had it set up to require you be signed in to Google to see the form. I replied to the manager saying I don't have a Google account, nor do I want one. He sent to form questions via email. But I'm convinced he had no clue as to why anyone would want to avoid Google. When I said there are plenty of less offensive alternatives to Google and I sensed he didn't care.