I recently moved to Yandex 360. We previously had DNS, mail etc. on Google until an outage[0] occured. The outage was the classical story of "billing error in related Play Store (!) account nuked entire GCP setup", which diminished trust enough that I decided to move everything away from Google. I'm a Xoogler, but even then getting through to the right support channels is hard.
Yandex services are pretty nice (they have an equivalent to most Google things), but even more important for me is that - even on the lowest plan - you can talk to a real human in support within minutes, 24/7.
I don't get this point of view. If you live in Russia, of all places, you'd likely want to avoid Yandex. On the other hand, for people from non-Russian countries Yandex is probably a better and safer choice than Google.
I made this same point awhile back to some colleagues, about my AmazFit smart watch. They were aghast that I'd have a Chinese product like that, given the possibility/likelihood of Chinese surveillance.
But, although China could monitor me, why would they care about some random guy out of 300 million Americans? And even if they cared, what could they do that might actually affect my life?
In contrast, we know that many US companies have an open wire to American law enforcement and surveillance agencies. And these people do have an interest in monitoring me (even if I'm not doing anything wrong), and they do have the power to harm me.
China might be eviller in many respects, but the products of a Chinese company are harmless to me, especially in comparison to domestic ones.
(And I also use Kaspersky for security on my home computers.)
I don't know about Russia, but this is not really an accurate perception. US laws tend to protect US Citizens and residents. Even citizens of friendly countries like Australia don't have protection.
In some ways it's worse because Australia is five-eyes, so they can do a, I'll spy on your citizens you spy on mine kind of thing (which we know from Snowden was exactly what they were doing)[1][2].
Yes, that's the point of using tools from unfriendly countries -- though I wouldn't be surprised if there's data sharing there, I haven't heard evidence of it.
I worked for LiveJournal, which was owned by a Russian company and what our platform removed for “misinformation” was a nothing compared to what companies like Twitter do today. I know Navalny (A Russian dissident) account is still active whereas platforms like Facebook and Twitter have banned multiple elected US politicians. If you want to avoid censorship the Russian platforms are great places to go.
Yandex has the best image reverse search algos of all the search engines. Dont take my word for it, just go and try it. If you live in the US what is the most dangerous for you? To be spied by your own government, or a government on the other side of the planet?
Yandex services are pretty nice (they have an equivalent to most Google things), but even more important for me is that - even on the lowest plan - you can talk to a real human in support within minutes, 24/7.
[0]: https://b.tvl.fyi/issues/155