This article appeared over the weekend: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/22/if-apple-is-the-only-organisation-capable-of-defending-our-privacy-it-really-is-time-to-worry
Nothing new here for most readers of this forum I guess, but every time something like this appears in the non-specialist press it makes me more optimistic about public awareness of privacy issues.
Yes, it’s good, there is a growing awareness about these issues I think, big news organizations writing about this seems to be more common now than it was a few years ago. There is hope… maybe. 
Still, the search function on theguardian.com (if you click “search” at the top of the page) leads directly to Google. 
They (The Guardian) don’t even let me search their own articles without telling Google about it. I wonder it Google pays for that, or if The Guardian is just lazy and foolish and gives my info to Google for free.
They no doubt have a Google Search Appliance or several in their IT shop and it probably feeds right off “the cloud”. Many of them were Dell R710 models colored yellow. I have one in my garage, I’m saving it for a joke, it is an older model colored blue.
Just put “Google Search Appliance” in your favorite search engine and look at images.
Found this:
Discontinued? It probably got replaced by “cloud” subscription services so customers won’t have to maintain hardware. Which inevitably means it will go on forever, the “hooks” are in for such businesses who subscribed and the contracts will last forever…
In any case, like I said, I have an older device in my garage. The joke is someday I’ll open it up and wipe the drive with DBAN and put a clean O/S on it. (Will PureOS work on it?) With a Google logo and paint job like THAT, it would be the joke.
The trouble is opening it up. Unless it has a Chinese puzzle box catch, I think I’ll need a drill because it looks like they spot welded the joints.
I suspect the latter. Can’t be bothered doing their own indexing and search.
To be fair, if you have a zillion documents then doing a good job of indexing and search is not easy, so it may be reasonable to outsource it to Google - but there is a certain irony in doing that on a page that contains an article about “defending our privacy”.
