As a tech person, I've always been observing small details, such as what personal information those services force us users to input and what not. I remember in the past when it was possible to create an email address within a few minutes, and you did not have to worry about your personal or private information being compromised because many services at that time didn't actually require you to disclose personal information, same as today.

Frankly speaking, I have nothing to hide as a person; but since I'm a liberal person, I take those things very seriously.

The way how Google contradict themselves makes me laugh sometimes.

When you go Incognito mode (because why not), Google will keep harassing you with the captcha sometimes till you give up or go back to your regular browser session with all the cookies stored.

I know that Google uses machine learning and that counts several risk factors, I don't need a lecture on that. However, I could interpret Google saying "We don't like it when we cannot collect your information".

Google is not just no longer valuing our privacy by bullying people for using incognito but also our security in a sense that Google themselves with their highly paid Devs, they couldn't stop a data breach that took place in 2018 via Google+. That means, if you're signed in via your Google accounts and doing your Googling while you're logged in, everything you search for and/or view can be stolen and misused in the wrong hands. Now, I'm not talking about how Google is already doing the same with Ads, but rather the question I'm trying here to raise, why we are not free to do our work without Google collecting our information?

I know you can tell me, "It's the price of using their service without paying money".

What worries me even more is that before, it was possible to create a new email on Google (Gmail) without providing personal information such as a phone number. However, this is no longer possible, you cannot simply create an email or an account without them collecting your personal information.

Finally, comes the question, is the internet still free or are the tech giants going to be deciding what we can learn and what we cannot about the world; is our freedom tied to corporations and their hidden agreements for surveillance. Do we need to be careful with typing certain keywords that they don't like or keywords that contain sensitive information about us, without doing 100s of risk calculations on whether Google will have a breach? Lots of questions can be asked.

While Google's browser product "Chrome" is the dominant browser today, we can feel that Google has begun taking the world for granted and doesn't mind controlling our lives, either directly or indirectly, with their algorithms.

According to Statista.com, the total number of active Gmail users, as of 2018, is around 1.5 billion. That means, Google knows a lot of personal information about 1.5 billion users across the world. That is more than Europe and Americas combined.(https://www.statista.com/statistics/432390/active-gmail-users/).

As Devs, we are committed into making our world better, and so I want both Devs and non-Devs to take a brave stand, to be bold and say "No" to those practices. There are several other services available that "Promise" that they are different or better, such as https://duckduckgo.com/ that is a lot more flexible and a bit more user-friendly since you don't have to push lots of accept buttons to do a quick search while you're shopping or in the middle of the road and need to find information about an address.