How to manage Google

[Dave2002]

Some of us may use Gmail or other products and/or services from Google. This is more likely for anyone who has bought an Android phone in an attempt to deprive Apple of revenue!

Sooner or later all the big tech companies try to come up with ways to grab you money off you.

I'm not only singling out Google, but if anyone want to try to manage some of the storage and other services which they may have inadvertently subscribed to, and now want to avoid having to pay for additional storage, then this video might help.

The last minute or so of this video may be the most useful, for some.

[Old Grumpy]

I was seduced into paying for extra storage to preserve my Gmail facility - it's only £1 per month (at least so far!) soo we'll see.

[Dave2002]

I was seduced into paying for extra storage to preserve my Gmail facility - it's only £1 per month (at least so far!) soo we'll see.

So far it's not so much for 100 Gbytes for 3 months. If you run right up to the limit then sometimes the price drops to something really quite small - but it goes up significantly after 3 months.

I'm hoping I might be able to regain control of this within 3 months, and will cancel before the end of the initial period.

That assumes that I can delete all the mystery stuff I don't want to keep, and safely download or redirect anything else to another email provider.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that Google Drive has caused problems with my system.

[Pulcinella]

I've just upgraded my Android phone (fingerprint recognition problem with the old one); Google certainly seems to be more invasive on the new one, but I'm getting more adept at saying No, thank you!

[kernelbogey]

I simply avoid Google as far as possible. But am in the clutches of Apple.

[gurnemanz]

I simply avoid Google as far as possible. But am in the clutches of Apple.

I would also like to avoid Google. I do use other search engines, eg DuckDuck, but in the main seem to have stuck with it as a search engine and for maps. I have a gmail address but only use it as a spare.

For online storage I am in the clutches of Microsoft. I didn't really want to be but in 2020 they discontinued my Office 2010, which I was perfectly happy with and I reluctantly opted into Office 365 at £59.99 per annum. One reason I went that way was the 1000gb of storage on their OneDrive which it offered. Having got over the subscription fee (fiver a month - more than a pint of bitter but only just) I have actually got on very well with OneDrive over the last couple of years. I back up most of my files there - photos, music downloads, docs etc and it interacts very conveniently with my PC.

[Dave2002]

I simply avoid Google as far as possible. But am in the clutches of Apple.

I am also in the clutches of Apple, though it's very hard to avoid being in the grips of several of the big companies, including : Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft.

One problem with some of these is that there may be parts - and software and service offerings etc. - which are very good, but there may also be some parts which are [effectively] either devious or money grabbing. Rules can change - as happened with Google and the link to photo storage and mobile phones. Some of the big companies actually use services provided by the others to make things work - for example Amazon Web Services.

Why should you trust any of these companies with your data? Yes - I know the stuff about how they keep it safe, and you can recover the data if your house burns down - but I also know that they can trawl your data for anything of value to them, maybe sell it on, and even the data recovery "benefit" doesn't always work. I know people who have lost data because when it came to the crunch the data they had stored "safely" wasn't available and accessible for restore.

I agree that it may be convenient, and sometimes very helpful, and often the relationships with these companies seems benign, but there is no guarantee that things will stay like that forever.
A company which seems trustworthy today may change overnight.