Google Simply Cannot Be Trusted
Only fools would trust GAFAM
This coming weekend we celebrate my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary. How did they make it that far, health factors set aside? Well, my father in law said on our wedding day that honesty and transparency matter. He said that based on personal experience, including mistakes made. People must be brutally honest, that's where trust is derived from (the expectation of honesty). To mislead or to gaslight is to abuse.
In the case of Software Freedom, why do you trust the latest release/update? It all boils down to trust. Even without auditing the code (or code changes) of every pertinent new release, one can sort of assume trust is there to be had; based on a track record, as well as many "eyeballs" out there "eyeing" the code, potentially alerting others about antifeatures creeping in.
Now consider proprietary software, which is a more formal way of saying secret software. It's not telling you what it really does to you, to your computer, and to people in your network. It demands blind trust or simply asserts there's nothing you can do about it because you're stuck, you're locked in or 'addicted'.
Not only should people not trust proprietary software; they should quit trusting proprietary software vendors such as Google. Yes, Google has some bits of code out there for particular portions, but Android is proprietary software (not AOSP; the stuff that Google licenses for OEMs to use, demanding inclusion of proprietary software like GMail, with removal being impossible, "disabling" isn't removing). Google Search is proprietary software. All the "Office"-like things of Google ("Workspace" or whatever they call it these days) are proprietary software. What is really Free software at Google? Almost nothing. They throw some portions of code into Microsoft's GitHub, which is proprietary software, then pay key organisations bribe money in "Summer of Code" clothing (leading to censorship or self-censorship of Google critics).
More people will realise (over time, maybe years) that proprietary software means untrusted software. And that proprietary software vendors are hostile, actively malicious hypocrites at times (their malware is "good", others' malware is "bad"). █