Google doesn't understand customer service. They really don't. When speaking to customers, I ask them what is the biggest issue with using a google product.They will most likely say - reaching a human being.
PS: I work for a competitor of one of google's products.
I just got 3 of my groups migrated to Signal. I expect many more to be migrated by the end of the month. While many may still remain lots of people will be off WA by 8th Feb.
Suggested to move and within one hour my group of peers all moved. Didn't expect it be to smooth but they are happy to add emoticons to each message and won't go back. The feature of automatic message expiration and deletion gives more options for conversations which are more sensitive and requiring higher levels of privacy. The next hurdle is to realize your keyboard application can log all you have written, so no Swift (Microsoft) or Gboard (Google) on that surface of snooping around.
I feel like worrying about GBoard reading your keystrokes is a little unnecessaru. If Google wanted to spy on your private conversations, they can find a way, even if you use a different keyboard. They... built the OS itself. Whether they can keep their meddling secret is another matter.
Say I register a domain with Namecheap. Namecheap will ask me who I want to resolve the domain (or offer to do it themselves).
I go and look up the details for DigitalOcean or Amazon or whatever and I put them in, but I either don't tell the hosting provider I've done this, or I later delete the domain in DO/AWS, someone else can come along and tell DigitalOcean that they own it (AWS as well, though it's harder since they have a bigger pool of name servers).
Once DigitalOcean believes that the new user owns it they allow them to edit the DNS records. The attacker can then point the domain at whatever server they like and "takeover" the domain.
The original owner can get it back by changing the details in their registrar. But in the mean time a bunch of traffic might have been intercepted by the attacker (all kinds of bad).
NB: this was the case in 2016 when the article was written, I have not checked if it is still the case.
The toughest thing in Google is getting in touch with a Human there. Its virtually impossible unless you know people working there. And this isn't just about scale. Take cloud services. Getting in touch with GCP customer service is a lot more difficult than other providers.
PS: I work for a competitor of one of google's products.