I’m still in disbelief having heard this for the first time today.

    • Seriously. They have been sending this message out for more than a decade now. Every new Google product or service that is any good will be shut down at short notice just when people start getting used to it. Only the search engine and Gmail endure.

      • People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren’t. They’re in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.

      • Yeah nah that’s just the places like YouTube, that they can throw the most advertising at, the issue is that they’re not muscling into any other avenues for income, e.g. Google Cloud, YouTube Music, Google Music Studios etc, shared specialised platform for music production and computing hardware, with more exclusive use of Golang tools etc, Vs AWS, a general all purpose solution.

    • Yup. I migrated everything out of Google when they killed Listen. Was on the edge after Inbox, but Listen was the last straw. They don’t know how to keep great products alive, and I’m tired of getting suckered punched by them.

      Exceptions are Android (because there’s no other options) and Angular/Golang, because they would survive being abandoned by Google. Hell, they’d probably improve!

    • Yeah, they tend to be like that… have dumped quite a few great services. Google+ was my favorite place until it was gonne. I was mostly using Reddit afterwards, and given current circumstances, I’m jumping at alternatives immediately. I at least want to be able to access them and know how they feel.

    • Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.

      • I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.

  • Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google’s privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer’s personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company’s privacy notice.

    Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn’t mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google’s whim.

    But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It’s not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s

    • Really? It’s not uncommon for me to have a service through one company and have that company be sold to another. I can think of at least two banks that I was a customer of when this happened. Similarly I’m sure it’s happened with some utilities, and maybe a telco.

        1. In this case, the service is disconnected from your data. With Google et al., your data is the product.
        2. Closing or some other form of taking your banking account hostage until you give them permission is not exactly something that should ever be possible to happen. This kind of service needs to be heavily regulated. Much unlike Facebook or some other social media stuff.
  • The article covers this a little bit, but I thought I’d share my email response from Google when I asked them “how can I prevent Squarespace from receiving any of my data?” They responded with:

    Based on the summary you have shared, I understand that you need help with your general inquiry about the Google Domains transition to Squarespace. To answer this, if you will be transferring your domains out of Google, all of the data will also be removed. This means that once the transition between Squarespace and Google happens, your data will also be removed.

    I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:

    I’m sorry for the confusion. To be clear, Squarespace will not receive any of your Google Domains data. Only the active domain names, excluding the domain names that have been deleted or transferred out, will be affected by the data shift to Squarespace.

    So if I trust their word, it means, if I’ve already transferred out my domains (which I have), Squarespace shouldn’t receive any of my customer information, or even have a record of who I am. Hopefully that’s true.

    • It clearly reads as autogenerated reply. It seems ambiguous to me still whether it’s thinking you’re trying to move your domains to squarespace and wondering if google sill keep data or if it’s about them moving domains to squarespace.

      Though I’m general I’d assume if you move all your domains out of Google Domains before the transition, there shouldn’t be anything for them to transfer to squarespace.

      • I didn’t put my actual inquiry in the comment since it would have made it too long. But I wasn’t asking them about moving to Squarespace, I was very clear that I am burning a bridge with both of them and have no interest in being a customer of either of them. I told them I’ve already moved my domains out of Google Domains, and I wanted to clarify if any historical data about me and my domains (domain ownership history, purchase history, receipts, etc) would go to Squarespace. And they replied with what I put in my comment.

        If I consider their reply to me, and the stuff I’m reading in the link OP posted, this isn’t really a “transition,” Squarespace is just buying the rights to all 10M+ domains Google Domains owns. But if Google Domains doesn’t own a domain anymore, it won’t be part of that transaction.

        That’s what I gathered, anyway. Hopefully they can be less ambiguous before the transaction actually happens. It will probably take the better part of a year, so there is plenty of time.

    • Yah now I am not trusting anything Google. This isn’t the same as others as it has been around what 9 years and was turning somewhat of a profit as they charge more then cloudflare and supposedly they are selling at cost.

  • Been bought by square spaces.

    Squarespace announced today it has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business, which will be winding down following a transition period. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.

  • Hold up - can anyone else read many of the comments in this thread and notice that many seem to be bots, all repeating comments by other users but slightly changed as if by AI and automated?

    The commentary in this thread reads as very unnatural. (I agree with the skepticism of Google, it’s not that, it’s the syntax of the thread).

  • Google Fi customers beware. I’ve been saying for a while it could be next and always met with the argument “well actually it’s easy for them to run and profitable so it’s definitely safe.” By the looks of this nothing is safe besides their most core products