Alphabet (Google's parent) reported Q2 2026 results (quarter ended June 30, 2026; announced ~July 22, 2026):
Revenue: $119.8 billion (up 24% year-over-year, or ~23% in constant currency).bc5def
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Operating income: $40.8 billion (up 30%; operating margin ~34%).
Net income: ~$112.1 billion (up ~298%; diluted EPS $9.11)
The large jump in net income was driven primarily by ~$98 billion in other income (mainly net unrealized gains on equity securities), not core operations.
Going through his list:
I don’t use GMail for personal emails - work does - oh well. Not my problem.
Haven’t used Google for years - many years.
Haven’t EVER used Google Drive.
Never used Chrome. I’ve used Brave since it’s been available - what - 5 years now?
Have never used WhatsApp or iMessage.
“everything you type into Word, Excel, or Powerpoint passes through Microsoft’s servers.” Bullshit!! If you use 365 and STAY LOGGED ON all the time, you’re a dumbass. I don’t use 365 and I am NEVER logged in, so this doesn’t happen. Nice BULLSHIT lie, though.
Ok - this is getting boring. The moral of the story is, use whatever the hell you want - just don’t be a dumbass.
Proton: Done
Duck duck go: Done (been using it for 5+ years)
Firefox: Done (don’t use chrome or edge)
Signal: N/A (don’t use Whatsapp either)
Libre Office: N/A (hate it. I only use MS office at work & if my IT department doesn’t care what gets shared with microsoft then neither do I. I don’t use personal info/data on work hardware)
Protonmail is my second largest platform. I still use Google and MS because I have been a bit too lazy to convert everything at this time. Very happy with Proton, and it is everybit as powerful as Google and MS.
I used to love firefox but it is a memory hog that they could never fix. I haven’t used it in years.
sorry... I stopped reading when it said all mail is outside US jurisdiction.
I’m not to trust microsoft, but I am supposed to trust some other country’s security!! smh...
I’ll just not send anything in e-mail that may incriminate me... problem solved...
Only thing I haven’t done is gmail and in reality any email can be read by AI regardless of what encryption you think you have.
Swapped out all of these years ago.
When did Microsoft start doing that? Which version?
1. Usage telemetry (what you open, not the text)
Office 2013 (announced 2012, shipped 2013). Built-in Telemetry Log / Dashboard recorded that a document was opened, closed, or threw an error, plus file name, add-ins, and machine info. Microsoft said this was not the file contents. An agent could also inventory recent files on Office 2003–2010. That is inventory and crash data, not a copy of the prose.
2. Features that send document content to Microsoft
That is the “connected experiences that analyze your content” layer: Translator, Editor/cloud grammar, PowerPoint Designer, Dictate, Analyze Data, automatic alt text, and similar.
Piecemeal cloud features existed earlier (online templates, Research pane, some translation) in Office 2010 / 2013. Designer and other content-using services became normal in Office 2016 and then Microsoft 365.
Microsoft named and documented the category clearly when subscription Office became the default.
Enterprise privacy controls to turn off “experiences that analyze content” arrived with Microsoft 365 Apps version 1904 (April 2019). If you never set those policies, those experiences stay on.
What Microsoft still claims
Required diagnostic data is not supposed to include the text of your files. Optional/connected features do send selected text or whole passages to Microsoft’s cloud to run the feature. Most of that is deleted after the job; a few services (parts of Editor) keep snippets to personalize suggestions. Practical line
Perpetual Office 2010 and earlier, offline, no Microsoft account: no routine content upload.
Office 2013: usage telemetry exists; content upload only if you use an online feature.
Office 2016 / Microsoft 365: content-analyzing cloud features are normal unless you disable connected experiences. M365 1904+: you can officially block content analysis by policy.
If you mean Copilot reading the whole document, that is later still (2023 onward) and only when Copilot is enabled and the file is in a connected tenant or you invoke it.
Can they still do that when Windows runs within a virtual machine on Linux?
What actually stops it:
No network on the VM, or a firewall that blocks Microsoft Office / M365 endpoints
Office privacy settings or Group Policy: turn off connected experiences that analyze content, optional connected experiences, and optional diagnostic data
A perpetual offline Office license with no Microsoft account signed in, and those features disabled
Not storing files on OneDrive
The Linux host only helps if you use it to cut the VM off the internet or to filter outbound connections. Running Windows “inside Linux” by itself does not.
/Grok
My plan is to run Word and PowerPoint 2007 on Win7 within a VM on Ubuntu. The email is now Thunderbird, as I went through the VERY painful process of translating 260,000 emails from Outlook.pst through EML files into MBOX. IOW, I put a cage around Microsoft products that actually run better than the current versions.
I usually use Apache Open Office. I’ll check out Libre.
-SB
LibreOffice Base is not a good replacement for Microsoft Access. I use Access 2013 on a Win10 box with no MS account. Microsoft has neglected Access in favor of SQL Server, so there are few compelling features on newer versions
I’ve already had a proton mail account for years. It works great.
I switched to the Brave Browser years ago and for any search that is remotely political, I use Yandex.
Obviously Google cannot be trusted. Duck Duck Go runs Google so you’ll get the same biased search results Google gives you.
Got my Android, downloaded Signal. What’s the first thing I see? “Choose a phone number that’s assigned to your phone, and Google will share it only with this app. Google won’t store the phone number you share with this app in your Google account.”
What good is it if Google is already involved? Tell me how to ungoogle!
Seriously, is there any point unless I use a Linux phone? Because Google is deeply embedded in the Android.