I've tried never to use any of their stuff, but searching online you don't know what you're going to encounter because some of the articles you read may be linked to google in some way that you can't see.  That's the trouble with techno stuff.  This is an interesting, albeit long, article all about google, how to avoid it as much as possible, and I'm urging anyone with a gmail account to close it as soon as possible. Unless, of course, you like being spied on ALL THE TIME.  This is SERIOUS business, folks.

It's very complicated, so the article is complicated, as well.  Read it twice if you must but try to understand the ramifications of what the article is telling you.  It's imperative that everyone understands this, so please pass it along to friends and family and everyone you can think of.   They'll thank you for it.

It's now become clear that Google catches every single thing you do online if you're using a Google-based feature. It's also clear that capturing user data is Google's primary business.16 The fact that it provides services while doing so is really beside the point and serves as a convenient distraction from the fact that obnoxious privacy violations are taking place.

As reported by Gawker:17

"Every word of every email sent through Gmail and every click made on a Chrome browser is watched by the company. 'We don't need you to type at all,' [Google co-founder Eric] Schmidt once said. 'We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.' "

Today's youth, and their parents, need to be particularly vigilant and aware of what Google is doing. Over the past five years, Google has taken over classrooms across the U.S. As noted by The New York Times,18 more than 30 million American children now use Google-based education apps such as Gmail, Google docs, Google classroom apps and Google-powered Chromebooks.

Once out of school, these youngsters are encouraged to convert their school accounts into personal accounts, allowing Google to build exceptionally powerful personality profiles of them as they grow into young adults. If these profiles are used for marketing purposes only, that would be bad enough. But what if they're used for other types of profiling? Google's data harvesting is particularly concerning in light of its military connections.19

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/09/13/google-monopoly.aspx