I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard.
The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail).
Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is.
On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one).
One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc.
I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too).
The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube.
Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose.
Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel).
Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.
It‘s hard to leave google completely behind.
Edit: Replaced Chrome first with Safari, then with Firefox and never looked back.
Edit 2: Moved all my photos from Google‘s cloud solution to iCloud when I migrated from Android to iDevices.
Edit 3: Fastmail (although a rather smallish company) do a phantastic job with their mail service. Their contact management and calendar are also superb. Fastmail + MailMate on MacOS are a dream-team.
> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
Try Searx[1]. It's a search engine aggregator that works with DDG, Google, and dozens of other search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances.
I've been using https://www.runnaroo.com/ and it's very good, better than DuckDuckGo in almost everything.
Sometimes I still fall back to Google but if that was becoming the norm on DDG, not anymore.
Another thing that helps is configuring custom search engines on Firefox. For example, for me typing `gh something` in the address bar does a GitHub search directly and so on.
I'm the creator of Runnaroo. Thank you so much for the kind words! It made my day. I was having the same experience where I kept having to fall back to Google, so this was a very much a "scratch your own itch" project.
>Any idea why Runnaroo gives you better results than DDG? It doesn't seem to have better data sources.
Not necessarily better data sources, but different data sources and a slightly different approach.
For organic results, the biggest different is that Runnaroo uses Google as the base for web results (similar to Startpage) where DDG uses Bing.
Outside of the organic results, Runnaroo's strategy is to integrate results from different vertical specific search engines who specialize in a niche topic. I call these 'Deep Searches' because they are essentially pulled from the database of the vertical source. It's the difference between getting an link to a website's home page vs. landing on the page and using their own search function to see the results.
For many queries, I believe this can provide higher quality SERP. For example, see the below results for "parkinson research" [0] or "react.js" [1]. The results are a lot more informationally dense than other search engines. Again, not necessarily better, but different.
DDG is still better for many queries(currency conversions, weather, etc), and definitely more polished, but I only launched Runnaroo a few months ago and new features and Deep Search sources are being added almost daily.
So TL;DR, Google results (with privacy) plus additional search results from relevant niche and authoritative sources.
It is. We integrate the Google results through their web search API, and comply with their usage terms of service (as we do with all the data partners we integrate).
I went basically the same route; got rid of my Google account (GMail, Android, etc.) and switched to an iPhone. The only things left where I indirectly use Google (see below) are precisely Google search and YouTube like you.
> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.
I have the same experience; I’ve tried switching multiple times, but at least for scientific topics, I find DDG far inferior to Google Search. My current workaround is to use StartPage.com, which is just a website that searches Google for you, but without letting Google track you.
> Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.
If you don’t need to actively publish or comment on videos, you don’t need a Google account to get most of the convenience of YouTube. Personally, I just use a good old RSS client to track my YouTube feeds in the same place I track other content (e.g. HackerNews posts). If you say that you use iDevices, I can recommend “News Explorer”, which syncs your feeds via iCloud (in contrast to all the RSS solutions that require a separate sync account).
> I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results.
In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).
I think Google's invasion of privacy can be regarded as a kind of "symbiotic parasitism" - they are able to leverage the information they harvest from you to improve search quality. A proxy won't give as good results as letting Google spy on you.
They show you results more like those they think you'll want. Woe betide you if you search political things; you'll be trapped in a partisan political filter bubble.
Yeah from my experience you get the kind of results that you would get from searching in an incognito window i.e. non-personalised (mmm although now that I think of it, they probably have fingerprinting techniques so that they can still track you while incognito)
Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?
Yes. Microsoft Office is dramatically better than Google Docs in terms of privacy.
I hate using Office 365 with a passion. The usability is horrible. Google Docs is much more pleasant.
But in any environment where privacy or security matters, I'd pick it over Google Docs in a heartbeat. In my day job, I work with data with compliance issues. We use Microsoft technologies and zero Google. As obnoxious as Office 365 is, that's the right choice.
Office has more functionality, without a doubt. File compatibility, privacy/compliance/security, and functionality are key reasons to use it.
Google Docs, on the other hand, the things it does, it does well:
1) Works reliably and without bugs. Last Word document I worked with began crashing Word at some point.
2) Works collaboratively. Google Docs keeps docs in sync in realtime. Office 365 has enough lag to suck at collaboration.
3) Keeps better versioning and version history. Word has a half-dozen different ways to do this, none of which are as good. Again, this is important for collaboration
4) Works better with people outside your organization.
The things it doesn't do, well.... it doesn't.
I've never had issue with Google Docs around UI speed. I have with Word. I think part of the reason is the simpler document structure and format.
In addition, Google Docs has working search tools (so you can find documents), albeit not great organization tools.
For most of my work, I'm not doing fancy formatting or other crap. I'm writing plain text, often on a team. For that, Google Docs would kick Microsoft's butt, if I trusted Google to allow me to comply with legal requirements (Google makes clear I shouldn't), and if I trusted Google not to disconnect my account tomorrow, based on some ML algorithm which decides I look like a scammer, or randomly discontinue something I'm using mid-document.
Excel is not word, but ok. If you need to edit plain text, sure. That's not a particularly interesting use case.
I don't collaboratively edit documents with people - I'd rather send them a version, take comments/revision, go through the comments and decide, instead of having them change the document text without my knowledge.
As for my use case I use spreadsheets.
I make spreadsheets that query databases and perform analyses and then spit out reports. Anyone with excel, db permissions, and the right db connector can use them. Google's version doesn't even have half the features I'd need to get it to work when I checked a little earlier this year.
The UI on google sheets is brutally slow and painful to use compared to something running not in the browser. Maybe I'm an odd case because most of my files have tens or hundreds of thousands of rows.
also, on point 4, I think this is some kind of computer tech bubble. once you go away from computer tech, google sheets is not great with people outside my organization because they're all expecting excel.
I would argue collaboratively editing documents is by far the most common and interesting use case, followed by presentations.
You seem to have an odd, complex workflow which is representative of 0.001% of the population. I'm glad Excel works for you. Microsoft does well with a number of complex oddball legacy workflows, full of VBA macros and what-not.
Your style of working collaboratively isn't very collaborative. Google Docs does allow that (you can share with suggesting changes), but for the most part, there's a gap between getting feedback on a document, and working together on one. I find version control to be super-helpful too; it's not like I don't see the changes after someone makes them.
I received many documents in that format in the past. Actually that isn’t the case anymore. I just have thousands of legacy documents in doc/x and xlsx format on my computer. Other than that I don‘t use MS Word to create documents anymore. I prefer Emacs/Org + pandoc.
The mere fact that Microsoft actually has real customer support and implements features alone makes it better.
I was trying to rotate non-image / non-word-art text in a Google Docs table cell the other day and it’s literally impossible. I ended up having to create it as word art and position it as an image so it appears to be in the table but actually is on top of it
When I searched for Google support threads on how to rotate text in Docs, I only found forum posts by Google support agents stating that you can’t do it, which read to me approximately as “fuck you go away.”
Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)
> Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? [...] the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox
They're both for-profit US companies saving your data overseas, so yes, for your last point it doesn't matter much. However, there are two advantages:
1) You're giving your data to a company aiming to sell you storage space vs a company which tries to make money of selling your (meta-)data, where selling storage space is only a minor accounting item. This also gives clear priorities: Dropbox loosing or being caught selling your data is a big reputation hit to them [0], while for Google it would neither change their reputation nor their total revenue by much.
2) You're not putting your eggs in one basket. If you're all in on Google, loosing your account does kill your calendar, contacts, mail, storage (possibly with the backups you need right now) ... . Also, that one company has basically full access to your life. If you're using diversified services you're far less likely to suddenly loose access to multiple services [1] and those services only own a part of your data vs your whole life [2].
Concluding this, selfhosting surely is the superior solution. But if you must use external storage providers (i.e. as worst-case backup or due to lack of money/space for own servers), choosing Dropbox over Google has its advantages.
[0] Yes, I'm aware it has happened.
[1] Assuming 2FA and a reasonably secure mail service, of course.
[2] One could argue that Google is going to guard your data with world-class engineers while the other services are probably less well equipped and therefore you have an increased risk of (at least!) parts of your data being leaked. That's personal risk management, though, and the consensus seems to be diversification.
You go on to partly refute this, but not strongly enough. Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security. Unless you spend all of your time managing your personal storage solution, self-hosting will be far inferior in these respects, and probably also in cost if a true accounting of time is included.
> Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security.
I'd not go as far. You can have your setup behind a VPN on a high port, go for distributed storage (for example at your home and at your parents) and be rather secure with a stable, auto-updated distribution. Cold backups could be an encrypted blob in a cloud or a tape somewhere.
Now, of course this needs quite some upfront investment in time and money; without a solid setup, I fully agree that the cloud is superior (unless your prefer your data lost over read by the NSA).
Other than that, it mostly boils down to risk management: A third-party hacker might have an easier time with your network than Google or Dropbox, but being script-kiddie save is not that hard [0], so it needs to be someone with time and skill. TLAs can't simply subpoena your data, so it might be harder for them - unless your home network is setup badly [1] or they're willing to possibly burn a zero-day. Your day-to-day ad agency is not going to lay hands on your data. It really boils down to what aspect you optimize for; given the grandparent, I assumed it to be privacy and therefore selfhosting to be probably better. But I should've been clearer on that :)
[0] Yes, mistakes happen, but big corporations have also been hacked with trivial exploits, so let's call it even.
[1] This also poses a danger to your login data, though, so the Cloud security team does not help either.
This is assuming you don’t leave home. If you travel a lot, self-hosting on your residential internet connection is not going to be a very good experience.
For my use case, I choose to be mostly serverless -- I use Resilio Sync. It's not a perfect solution as they still host the tracker and if one device cannot find another then it routes via their servers, but otherwise all my documents are stored on my devices.
Another feature lacking is sharing with a non-resilio user is not possible with Resilio Sync.
While I like Syncthing and used it for a couple of years, my experience is that Resilio is way faster for syncing large numbers of files (e.g. Git repos or large photo collections). Resilio also appears to be more easily reachable behind routers and corporate firewalls that for some reason block Syncthing. For those with an iPhone, that platform is also supported by Resilio but not Syncthing.
Conceptually, using what the SEO community feels google does every time google does an algorithm change that muddles SEM / organic after a revenue drop (source: mozcom 2019), you would have to assume they would keep marginally pushing incremental borders to ameliorate any drop or “lower than wall street expected growth” in ad revenue. So the OPs approach to fully migrate is consistent with that world view.
I loathe Google Docs for the horrible UX. Dropbox was great (modulo security/privacy) but they are increasingly moving away from what made it great (a simple file system abstraction). My absolute favorite today is Keybase (it includes cloud file storage too) which is the only of my options that I actually trust to be private.
"Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice."
No update since. Keybase still works (and I use it constantly), but will it be around in two years?
Of particular interest, if you're someone who's ditching Google services out of concern about privacy issues, is that
Condoleezza Rice voiced support for warrantless wiretaps during Bush Jr's administration, and was also involved (to what degree is debatable) with the authorization to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" (aka torture). Whatever you personally think about these issues, if you're concerned about privacy, that she is in Dropbox's board of directors should be a big red flag.
I've run a nextcloud instance as a dropbox (+contacts/calendar sync) alternative for years. But recently I was looking through their collection of apps, and there's actually so much more you can do with it. It has a webmail interface, video conferencing, collaborative document editing, a Google maps replacement, feed reader, etc etc.. I haven't used most of these yet so I can't say how well they all work. And a decent number of them are basically just iframes to embed other services (eg, etherpad or BigBlueButton). But, as a whole, it pulls together a ton of the things you might think of as "internet utilities". It's a shame about the brand, because the idea of it being your Own [personal] Cloud fits really well. I could totally see running an instance for less tech-literate family members or friends. Particularly my grandma, whose collection of bookmarks in her toolbar basically comprise "her internet".
You misunderstand. Chinese users in China connect to Dropbox and Google Drive servers outside of China, where nothing is available to the Chinese government. Non-Chinese users in China connect to Chinese iCloud proxies in China, which handle data that has already been decrypted using the storage key, which remains outside of China, so anything the user accesses is available to the Chinese government. Chinese users in China have their iCloud data stored in China, where it is all accessible to the Chinese government at any time. Aside from that, there is no meaningful difference in privacy among the services.
DDG works well enough for me on anything but programming. The moment I need to search for anything programming related, Google works much better for me.
I'm not sure if this will work. Google results are absolutely horrible for me, but not for my brother. It may be because they don't have a profile on me, but they have years of data on him. Using a proxy search engine may result in degraded results for someone who is currently getting good results from Google search.
>It may be because they don't have a profile on me, but they have years of data on him..."
That might be true, but I'm not sure. Outside of local searching I am skeptical of the benefits of filter bubbling.
I think it is just as likely that you and your brother have different opinions of relevance (even if you were both returned the same exact results unrelated to past activity), and the relevance decisions Google makes more align with your brothers perspective.
I am the creator of one of the search engines [0] named in the post. It will return the same exact organic results no matter who you are or what your prior searches were. Feel free to give it a go with your brother and see how it compares for both of you. For organic results, it works like DuckDuckGo does with Bing, but the difference is the main source of our organic results are actually from Google.
You can use a pejorative if you want, but context is quality. Context-free searching is dumb and the results are bad. An example: if I search for "2020 Honda Insight EX" on Google, I see some mixed bag of stuff about my car. If I then search for "tires" -- no other terms, just tires -- Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car. There are important inputs to my search result that I didn't have to type.
Now go to DDG and search for "tires". Useless results only. All advertisements and commercial results, but nothing relevant to me. "Getting out of my filter bubble" did not help me in this use case.
>Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car
That's actually a really interesting example. The tire sizes for a 2020 Honda Insight EX are either 215/55/16 or 215/50/17 [0].
So taken at face value, the filter bubbling was either incorrect or Google was just returning results for a very common tire size in this case.
I agree that context is important, but Google doesn't return results blindly when they are not able to do personalization. They already know the results that millions (billions?) of other people who have searched for tires have clicked and found relevant.
However, when you change car, or happen to have many, or switch interest from buying a car for your family to learn about tires manufacturing process, then madness is ensured.
I bought a large refurb iPad Pro and pencil this spring. Presumably a high value segment, since YouTube, amazon and google keep on pushing me iPad related ads and content for months now, for things I have already bought, out of my own research.
I guess I’ll have to fake some baby related purchases to have their focus changed.
I have yet to find a case where "profiling" benefits me, as a user.
Ah, the CEO of Fastmail is responding ;) Let me tell you this: It‘s a beautiful product with a very intuitive UI: Every setting is there where I expect it. Also the support is very responsive and very helpful. Thank you!
It‘s good to have you here and a good thing when CEOs keep in touch with their customers, listen to them, and eat their own dog food. - Imagine Tim Cook would have used a MacBook Pro (with the miserable key) and/or listened to the complaints. And a thousand more examples I can think of.
Unfortunately we still need some kind of signal that you're a unique person at signup to avoid infinite fraud (as it is we still get waves of thousands of accounts at a time who have worked out a way to get their hands on a pile of numbers and are finessing an attack on someone else via us).
You can delete the number once you've signed up, though of course that means that if you forget your password is reduces the channels by which we can validate that you're the same person! (this is also quite common: many HN users would be surprised how often people forget passwords)
Those people can also stop paying you and just wait until you recycle their email address. No password recovery needed when it's up for anyone to grab.
Apart from that we're no longer recycling email addresses as fast as we used to (except for trials that never paid, they only get prescribed for a short time) that doesn't work so well for getting access to your existing email!
I work for inbox.eu
It is based in European Union and has 20 years experience as e-mail provider We do not require phone number for premium users. If You are using free trial version You still need to verify phone number to test e-mail sending (receiving works). It is needed to avoid spammers who signup for free to send spam.
mailbox.org does not require a phone number. It also includes its own calendar sync and online office suite(although I've never really tried the office functionality myself).
I've been using it for a few years now and I can't complain.
Not an alternative, bit insidious is aborter frontend to YouTube... and om Android there is newpipe.
However, for me, the problems are: Maps. Google Maps are great.
Calendar: my calender provider online has ICS calendar sharing, not e.g. itip.and imip.
I decided to start becoming an active contributor to OpenStreetMap. If a business isn't on the map, I just ask whoever works there a series of questions and upload the new POI. Some of the maps, like those in Bangkok actually mapped out a lot of footpaths that say go through a mall that save a ton of time walking vs Google Maps.
I am also a contributor to OSM, but it does not replace the need for Waze, for example. They are partially redundant, but not completely interchangeable.
They dropped some side teams, but the deal with Google that we thought wasn't happening actually happened a bit later. They're still good. They had future regardless, it's not the end of the world for them to run a bit more lean.
I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts
Anyways
Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.
Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened
They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that
Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google
Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone
Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari
Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either
avoid all google services as mucha s possible
Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games
Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source
I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.
The problem I have is not the tracking, but Google’s dominance of the browser market. They can (and do) push through efforts that mostly benefit Google, and their ability to keep everyone inside the Google ecosystem.
In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.
because the impending layoffs that mozilla is incurring in light of covid means it's very bad for development and bug tracking. i've been using firefox for several years and that part is kinda worrying.
There is also another alternative for search... Use search agregator (https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/) and do the search on all those sites (and more) at once. I am self hosting it and it works great.
LineageOS tends to disable a lot of security baked into android, so itmight not be a good recommendation. According to Daniel Micay: "It significantly weakens the SELinux policies, rolls back mitigations for device porting / compatibility, disables verified boot, lacks proper update security including rollback protection, adds substantial attack surface like FFmpeg alongside libstagefright, etc. They merge in huge amounts of questionable, alpha quality code from the Code Aurora Forum repositories too. Many devices (including Nexus and Pixel phones) also don't get their full firmware updates shipped by LineageOS. It's unrealistically expected that users will flash the firmware and vendor partitions on their own each month and of course that's another incompatibility with verified boot and a locked bootloader." [0]
Security is always weighting between danger and benefits. It means something different for everyone of us, i consider my phone with microg, netguard and xprivacylua and without google or any 3d party application beeing able to connect to the internet unless faking the data as secure (or, if you want - private), while I am not only flashing but also building my roms until I get full linux support for my second phone when I will depart from android world.
For now, lineage is as good as it gets, sure, I would love to have patched OS, withoug google etc., but for now there is really not much of alternatives available for various models of phones, and quite frankly - probably more than half of android phones are vulnerable, unpatched etc. let me just mention latest DSP vulnerabilities. At least attack surface isnt that big :D
Half of those "security" features are at best useless and at worst more DRM features anyways. And yes, the firmware update mechanisms in android are abysmal in general, but that this is slightly better in google phones doesn't mean that it is good anywhere. For the most part, lineageOS is on par with any random android vendor there. No better and no worse. For software updates, it is generally far better.
Agreed on self-hosted search. I wrote a post in Feb. 2020 describing localhost installation of searX, which I've using since then as my interface to web searches. At times I revert to Google, e.g. for image searches, but I do that logged out of my Google accounts.
Sure degoogle, but that point about Google earnings from ads having dropped doesn’t seem relevant to Google abusing its power, or being incompetent at its core business. I would be surprised if it wasn’t because of COVID-19 shock and that the larger economy wasn’t also moving similarly.
Mozilla, at least, has shown they're not married to Google - they had Yahoo als the default search engine for a couple of years because Yahoo was the highest bidder.
Edge used to be an alternative on Windows at least, but now it's also based on Chromium. :-( I'd always prefer Firefox, but if you want to avoid Google money, you're basically up to Microsoft or Apple. The latter tying you to a hardware monopoly.
> Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.
Agree. It would become a little easier if all major broadcasters would at least mirror their youtube content on other networks like Peertube. That would not solve the recommendation problem to discover new videos, but at least the hosting itself would be taken care off this way.
In the 3-dot menu for each recommended video there's an option called Not interested. Select that to train YouTube's algorithm on what you're not interested on. The menu is not available on every interface, usually it's found on the desktop one. It has worked really well for me so far.
Creators rely on them to drive traffic though and that's part of what makes YouTube sticky for producers.
The creators remain incentivized to use YouTube as a platform because they can leverage the recommendation algorithms to drive traffic to their content.
While this remains true YouTube is here to stay.
People will go to where the content is. The content will go to the platform that makes it easiest for them to build an audience.
I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1.
Outlook decided it would be a nice idea to change my "Thank you" signature to an emoji in a business casual email.
For mobile, I use an Android for all the apps I can't avoid not having, but otherwise I resort to Blackberry like the old coot I am. My Q10 is still reliable af.
I made the switch to DDG as my first search engine of choice a couple of years ago and when I am dissatisfied with my DDG searches, I usually compare them to !g and !b searches and find they are only infrequently much better.
I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with bookmarks or navigating Google. Getting familiar with bang queries I think makes you have a much less siloed view of search.
I just wish DDG would make the bang options available as a button, so I wouldn't have to type them on mobile. Adding "!g" to an existing query requires 7 taps, versus just 1 for a button (!)
You can't really compare the US, an active empire with documented testimonies of spying on individuals and, e.g. Ireland, Switzerland or most other european countries.
At some point, if China is the comparison point you always cite when someone talks about the US, it starts to seem like they are actually comparable.
Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa
But that's not what your parent post is about. It's about that in America, you need to worry more about U.S. surveillance than about Chinese surveillance. And when in China, you need to worry more about Chinese surveillance than American surveillance.
What you state has nothing to do with that. If I understand you right, you are saying that you should be more worried in China than in the U.S. overall. That might be true, I can't judge. I can imagine there are rules in China too, maybe they are just not so pleasent? And I suspect some folks in Portland have some mixed feelings about the "just kidnap" part too.
I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance.
I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.
On just principles, I tried switching to DDG, Gmail alternatives like Hey etc, Maps alternatives but they are not even close to making your life easy. At the end of the day, I really don't want to take time categorising every email, handle spam on my own, worrying about data security. Services like Gmail seem far superior to alternatives to me.
Edit:
Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing.
In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people.
I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average).
Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use.
DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).
Well, if business model is what you are worried about. If people are fine with paying for email services, you can even pay for Gsuite and then no ads on even Gmail and even custom domain support. I am not sure on this but I doubt they would be mining any paid Gsuite user's data. Also, even in free you can turn off personalized ads and they would no longer be related to your data.
The thing is as you mentioned, with something as personal as email, docs or drive, I would trust a big company to keep it safe. Specially one that has historically has had a very good track record of it. Google hires some of the best offensive security guys, some of them you can see in Project Zero.
My experience with DDG hasn't been good at all with anything other than simple term search or website search.
I think that’s a reasonable position to take and you won’t find any disagreement from me.
I like supporting software companies where the product is their main focus (I think the ad driven business model is a corrupting influence on design).
It can also be tedious to go through all the settings and make sure things remain the way a user would want them. I like working with a company that has incentives aligned with the user.
On DDG, I would have said the same thing not that long ago. Everyone will have their own threshold for what’s good enough for them.
> I doubt they would be mining any paid Gsuite user's data
I use G Suite at work, and I wondered about this. From Google's modus operandi, I assumed they are mining data, for example, of all work emails to and from the accounts - and probably connected to my personal email addresses somehow, as part of a profile to target ads.
Is there a confirmation that this is not (or is) being done? I suppose, from a security/privacy perspective, it's safer to assume that it is, because it's technically possible.
I have two chromium profiles, one for work using a G Suite account and one using my personal gmail account. I've noticed the browsing history and search from my work profile impacting my personal search results.
I don't believe they use G Suite email/docs to mine data, but the rest is likely fair game.
> Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product.
Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.
Yeah, Gmail hasn't become that fast with loading etc. considering how much internet has improved. That is one place where I think they can improve a lot.
It also might be related to all the smart auto compose/grammar features they have been adding, which do really improve your workflow but might add just more resources to load/parse on page load.
This is how superhuman mail came about. Silly paid solution to a UX problem, but would recommend as a practical workaround if gmail is a major bottleneck to your day job productivity
Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it.
Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1]
That would require actual patriotism from these companies. They have repeatedly demonstrate by playing (legal) games with taxes and by having Chinese slave kids create their products that it is simply not of interest to them. QED
It seems to me gmail has not changed much in the last few years. Search is much the same but worse. The only change seems to be snippets that, for me, usually host some badly scraped content from another site with wrong answers but more effort on SEO. It seems a bit of a waste of 20% of the page. I wonder what those tens of thousands of people are mainly doing? Maybe working on stuff that we never see, like applying bandaids and string to hold together the ever growing infrastructure that provides the mediocre apps to more and more of the world?
I wonder what they're doing, and then I look at the educational space and I realize just what's happening. And I'm kind of alarmed by it, to be honest. Call me paranoid, but we have a growing generation of kids in school that only know Google services. The only web browser is Google Chrome. The only email is Gmail. All word/spreadsheet/etc is Google Docs. School is Google Classroom. Chat is Google Messenger or whatever it it. Google Photos. Google Search. Google Cloud. Google Drive. Google Video or Youtube. ALL they see all day in and out at school are Google properties.
I can't be the only one that has noticed this over the years.
I really enjoyed google inbox. Gmail moved a few things over from it, but what I really appreciated was archiving everything older than a month, because usually it was promotional crap anyway.
I've found Gmail's automatic categorization and importance filtering to be a killer feature. Is anybody else doing that reasonably well? I don't want to have to set up a bunch of features manually.
I had actually thought of building such things as a startup idea before Gmail was doing it. Perhaps I should have; perhaps Google would have just eaten my lunch.
I concur with the other comments that Fastmail is actually better than Gmail these days: the web UI is much faster and nicer, the Android app is not perfect but pretty decent, filtering and customization options are better.
My only potential concerns are: spam (I still get most email to my gmail address and imported by fastmail, which filter out spam on the gmail side, so I don't have a good sense of their own spam filter), and overall security (their own production security as well as resistance to account takeovers, etc.)
> I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance.
There are times when that is true, and there are times when it is simply a matter of adapting to the differences. For example, you mentioned trying a ThinkPad with Ubuntu after using a MacBook. You claimed that the MacBook seems to be at the sweet spot. It reflects your experiences so that's a fair assessment. Yet my experience in moving from a MacBook to a Linux PC was quite the opposite. A significant factor was my extensive prior experience with Linux, as well as a desire to reap the benefits of Linux (rather than to escape the drawbacks of the MacBook).
> Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
Don't confuse "pay for" and "ad free" with "no data mining". At least with consumer goods, companies were mining data from paid products well before the Internet was a thing. I also wouldn't be surprised if Google mines some data from business accounts, even if the scope of that data collection is severely limited.
> I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu)
Perhaps the change was made more difficult by the fact that you changed two variables at once: the OS (macOS -> Ubuntu) and the hardware (Macbook -> ThinkPad). Something to consider.
Now some aspects of how businesses conduct business is somewhat of a "practical reason."
For example, even if Apple products actually provided decent cost/performance ratio, I would never switch over to them because of how hostile they are to leaving their ecosystem. I don't have a huge problem, as a user, with more nebulous complaints about hostile business practices and the like. The issue is simply that it would be a pain in the ass for me personally, and require making a lot of annoying compromises, or swapping to more, and less effective apple hardware.
Like if we roll back the clock to 2015 when MBP's are probably hands down the best business laptops, from a hardware standpoint I'd love one compared to alternative laptops, and at least for a work-only computer when I have zero other devices and interactions to worry about, it could be a decent option.
Don't like some of the ways they do business? Who cares, I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot on general principle.
The difference with google services is a lot more stark though, there's nothing I would even remotely consider competition to gmail now, and the things were only worse when gmail first came out. These days migrating would be an absolute nightmare. I'd still do it if someone offered me a way better option, but people in this thread are talking about downgrading to some shite service on general principle, causing themselves significant pain in the ass in order to give some other company that definitely does not give a shit about acting in some morally upstanding way money, for a lower quality product.
There's no replacement for youtube, and frankly video services are are starting to look like a natural monopoly to dwarf all prior uses of the term, as youtube could never survive outside of google's business model, and can't be split up without just destroying it completely.
So anyway, I don't think people are being all that honest about their "switch from google" being ever so easy and worthwhile. Personally I lose a lot by swapping purely because the alternatives are shit, so I won't be doing it.
People switching from android to iPhone because "goOgLe bAd" are the height of irony though.
Newpipe has completely replaced my Youtube usage since I mostly use it on mobile, and it lets you save your subscriptions locally. Its actually really nice and imo superior to the dumbed down Youtube app used nowadays anyway. Freetube is the same idea but for desktop, but I've found it to be much buggier in using it, so I occasionally just use youtube in a private tab and directly search for a video on desktop, usually after seeing in my Newpipe feed. Both of these are listed in the original list, but they deserve special shoutouts since YouTube is the site with the most universality within Google's ecosystem. Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute.
Newpipe and Freetube are YouTube frontends, so all the content is there just without having to sign in. If you only really use a subscriptions list and directly related videos as your way to find youtube content, it's a drop in replacement. If you want to use google's recommendation algorithm though,I don't think anyone is going to be able to recreate that experience any time soon.
> Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute.
Or moving to Nebula. Somehow https://watchnebula.com/ gained a lot of attention recently with maybe half of my yt subscriptions also publishing there. (Or maybe it's just my bubble)
An entire day! I wish it were that easy. My password manager says I have 331 accounts using my gmail address. I figure it'll take me a year to move everything if I spend a couple hours a week. I categorized them into tiers based on importance and still ended up with 63 in the top "important or regularly use" tier and 59 in the next "will probably use again" tier. The lower tiers, I'll probably not even bother with.
Same here, but I simply forwarded ALL incomming e-mail from my old Gmail to my new email address. That way, i did not have to change all website accounts at once.
So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.
The incremental approach is always the better solution imo. For email, for password managers, for any big migration. People always put off saying it'd be a lot of work, but if you start at any given time, within 1-2 year you'll be fully migrated.
This is what I did for password manager, I migrated each website on a per-use basis. Every time I used a website with a manual password, I replaced it with a generated password. This automatically prioritizes more important websites, which you tend to use more often.
For email, similarly, you migrate to the new email, and you give people the new one gradually too. Eventually anything that's left over will be spam, and that'll actually be your "less-important" secondary address you can give to websites you don't care about.
Published "privacy policies" seem to be a way of preserving opacity. It is nigh impossible, absent litigation discovery, to decipher what the company is actually doing.
There is an automatic email change option in few password managers but yeah, that's one of the reasons why I have been redirecting lot of things using my own domain name. If in future, some service go down - I can reroute that. If google deprecate gmail, no worries.
Changing it in the password manager is the easy part. The tricky one is changing the account details on the different site and switching from @gmail.com to @myfancydomain.whatever
I did the same several years ago. Dropped a GMail account I had for ~10+ years and switched to Fastmail. I hard deleted the account. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t _deleted_ it but I’ve really only run into that on a very small number of occasions.
I too switched to Fastmail and have been happy. I have a new Google account I use with YouTube and very occasionally Google Docs/Sheets, but I run it in a container tab in Firefox.
If you have a password manager and have been using it for awhile it makes things a lot easier since you can identify what you have tied to the account. I had over 100 sites tied to my GMail account and was able to mostly clean it up in a Saturday.
I also moved all my e-mail off Gmail and onto Migadu using my own domains. This ensures that even if Migadu goes under, I could swifty move to another service and keep my same e-mail addresses (for the record, Migadu is awesome).
Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.
Migadu just announced today they're getting rid of the free plan. The next plan up that supports multiple domains is $19/yr and unlimited domains would be $29/mo.
I had been keeping on there my side-project domains, which didn't really need a full gSuite backing them, since only a handful of emails would go in or out per month.
If Migadu's were a more reasonable price, I would have shrugged and upgraded. But going from $0/mo to $29/mo is a stretch.
Hey, also wanted to let you know that the e-mail they sent out had errors in it. According to the new pricing page (here: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/) The $9/mo plan offers unlimited domains. Definitely pricier than the previous $5/mo, but much more reasonable than $29/mo for unlimited domains. Hope this helps.
The 5-domain limit on the Micro plan is also a "soft" limit, and support has implied to me that you could negotiate something that works for you if need be.
Agreed. Ironic that this happened so soon after my recommendation.
Fortunately for me, the new Micro plan works fine, but at this point, I think services like Mailbox.org might provide greater value compared to the upper tiers.
Quite well in my experience... sometimes too well. When you sign up with Migadu, you are essentially your own postmaster and can set how aggressive you want to filter spam on the domain level as well as per mailbox.
I think they appeal to powerusers that probably already use a client like Thunderbird. :) However, their webmail client is just RainLoop, which you can find a demo of here: https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/
Also, they are currently collaborating with sourcehut to develop a new webmail client to replace RainLoop. For the record, I like RainLoop quite a bit and find it to be very speedy.
Sure, but as a poweruser with a surname domain I have to be considerate of all none-poweruser relatives that are going to be using it.
So even though I'll barely use it at all I signed up for Migadu only so that I could have a look at the webmail UI. But I couldn't even get a look at it, likely because I have yet to configured my domain. But I will not disrupt my domain just to get a peak at the UI...
No problem. Not sure if you noticed, but I mentioned they use Rainloop for their webmail, which I provided a link to a demo of if you're just interested in checking out the webmail UI.
Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.
What new laws in Australia are you referring to? I did a quick search and I saw a lot about anti-spam laws (which is great), but how does that affect switching your own domain to fastmail?
The grandparent comment is likely referring to the TOLA Act, which allows Australian police and intelligence agencies to issue for example technical assistance requests to decrypt or otherwise get access to whatever data they want.
I use a combination of Mailo, Mailbox.org, and Runbox with my domains. They have their varying quirks but I am happy with my choice esp. wrt. their host countries.
A few months ago I started an Etsy shop, but I couldn’t create an account using a fastmail address. I got an “unknown error.” And the help desk suggested I use a more mainstream email service. That solution worked, and then I switched it to fastmail.
But this goes to show how basic the opsec is for some companies. Similarly with Twitter, each time I create a dev account for a bot, if I use fastmail my account will get locked 3-4 times in the first 20 minutes after creating the account (and not so with gmail). I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account, and are more likely to use fastmail.
> The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail
Every time google has done something to piss me off over the last few years, I have channeled that into migrating a few accounts away from google. It's a good way to unwind and has the bonus of being an action that speaks louder than words.
> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.
I would include Maps to this list. Outside of the US (and presumably China although I do not have experience here), Google Maps has no real competitors.
For motoring, commercial POIs, and address-level searches. For walking/cycling and non-commercial POIs, OpenStreetMap is consistently better in Europe.
Two years ago i created a gmail account without providing mobile number and was using it on youtube for commenting on political videos. In the past few months i noticed my comments were getting upvoted frequently and then last week gmail is forcing me to provide mobile number for verification to login to my account. If google wants to have mobile number for creating accounts that fine but why force after 2 years. That feels cheating. The whole point is i don't want retaliation from political parties for commenting on the internet and don't want to be tied to my real identity with my mobile number. Sadly there is no competitor for youtube.
Stupid question but why not just forward if all your other activity is off of google? Do you believe the gmail data capture is high enough that your otherwise complete migration would be compromised?
I haven’t deleted the old account yet and do have it importing right now (that’s a good strategy for catching any straggling accounts or friends you haven’t given your new email too).
I don’t have a good answer beyond some weird sense of aesthetic tidiness. I have a dash of wanting to compulsively organize things, so having the old account bothers me irrationally.
The thought of arbitrary shutdown and their 'legendary' customer service got me moving off Google services. I started with Runbox using my own domains, which works well though some emails just never got delivered. I'm now on a combination of Runbox, Mailo, and Mailbox.org with long-term prepaid plans and I'm satisfied - I'll probably prune at some point but the prices are so reasonable that the urgency to do so is not there. Support by Mailo and Runbox has been excellent.
For me, google docs was the hook that made me create another account. Every volunteer project I go near uses them.
I tried creating aliases for the projects so that each product team could reference me by an email address that reflected the project. But after a year or two I had loads of these aliases and would accidentally open a doc for one project whilst logged in to gdocs as the identity for another project.
I now just have one identity for google. And I feel dirty.
I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned?
Not OP (but another Fastmail customer) - but there's a difference between caring about the use of your personal data from a eaves-dropping/tapping/threat perspective vs having your personal data used to make you the product. Fastmail is a paid service that provides an excellent service/product where the email you send/receive isn't monetised or incorporated into a revenue/ad machine.
Yeah this is all fine once you have accepted the trade offs and designed your threat model around it. People get extremely zealous around this sort of shit.
One decision for another person does not need to be taken by everyone else just because it makes sense for you.
I, like you am concerned about the use of data but I take a different approach. I don't mind if my data is used for product insight/generation once it is aggregated anonymized data, with the caveat that the website and or service is GDPR compliant.
I give bonus points to any website that lets you nuke your account from the profile page without having to jump through e-mail hoops. I had a recent experience of requesting an account erasure under GDPR via e-mail. I expected the usual "are you sure?", "do you know the implications?", "who are you?" but no they just deleted the account straight away. I only found out it had been done by trying to login to the service again.
I have this problem on Steam of all places. Way back when, I guess you had to sign up with your email as your username. I've long long since left that email behind, but it's still my username for logging onto Steam.
Same here. I got steam when a friend bought HL2 waaay back, finished it, then gave me the game by giving me his account. All these years later, I've changed the email and built up the library, but the username is still my friends real name.
google is well on its way to being dead. their customer service doesn't exist. gcp is a joke -companies either go with smaller cheaper providers or azure/aws. their flagship os is famous only heavily modified on other vendors' phones. for the simple, they get an iphone.
the reason people use their search is that it's default -if it was bing no one will notice. ads? super customized ads are not worth the money to companies, lighter cheaper personalization is available from many vendors.
google literally is yahoo.
to tech people -the ones who made google what they are, google is actively their enemy, and for the regular user, they want an iphone, and they want customer service with a smile -google has none.
me, i never googled-up. zoho for $1 a month, create new aliases for spam and filter them into folders. no gmail needed. maps? apple for iphone is ok, but i just use heremaps. you click a country, click download, and a couole of gig later you have full search offline.
now youtube, that's an interesting product that's only popular because it's popular. and it was popular before google bought it. there are many unpopular competitors. all it takes to take down youtube is an app for another service included by default on samsung and iphone home screens, and youtube is gone.
the same goes for facebook and twitter. myspace, yahoo, aol -all had their 15min of fame, all thought it would last forever. who cares. google is old news.
I live in a country which is very sparsely populated and there are really no good alternatives to google maps and google translate which work most of the time unfortunately. Most other maps services like open street maps and Apple maps are so outdated and sometimes so wrong it is even dangerous to use them for navigation. As per translation everything really sucks. But google is better of them all.
I needed way longer than a day to get all of the accounts I created over the years with my gmail. I found I had to check my gmail for over a year until I was confident that I wasn’t missing any accounts.
Still use YouTube and Google search. They have no (decent) competition still.
Ah thanks. Sounds like you had it quite easy to be honest, and you must not get a lot of emails at all. Not every email is an action item for me—many are just for record-keeping purposes and later searchability, though I have certain filters for those to mark the occasional ones that require action. I would go absolutely insane if I had to look for even 0.1 seconds at every email.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "
The leaks suggested the NSA was accessing information via taps between unencrypted data center connections, not via direct support or collaboration from the companies.
After the leaks google encrypted those connections.
The other parts are within FISA and other parts of the law. There may be disagreements with the transparency or way this stuff works, but your first comment was overly broad and mostly inaccurate.
If only Google were my 10th biggest problem. Try to get Exxon, Shell, et al out of your life who aren't violating abstract principles but are literally killing the planet. Then let me get unethically farmed or raised foods out of my life (which, thanks to the US preoccupation with corn and the nitrogen it requires, are frequently overlapping with petroleum). Then let me get Oracle and Microsoft out of my life. Then let me get the Murdoch empire out of my life. Then let me get Facebook out of my life. Then let me buy a consumer good that isn't designed for obsolescence. Then let me get intermediate middlemen in the healthcare system in the US out of my life. Then I'll take an eye at Google.
All good, valid points. There are so many things that needs political attention. And exactly for that reason, I think ranking these companies according to how evil they are hardly helps. We need significant regulatory changes around climate, privacy, farming, etc. One political issue may have priority over others, but the whole thing is more political than personal (getting a company out of my life).
Why Microsoft over Facebook and Google? Recently I've been thinking that MS is the FAMGAN/whatever that I'd be most willing to work for, so I'm interested to hear your case.
Because I saw how they behaved in the 90s, see how much passive telemetry they collect with their share of the OS market, how much they push Windows logins with antipatterns, and because they own Github (when now controls npm).
edit: Let me say some nice things about them. I put them towards the end for a reason, and they probably don't belong with Oracle. I don't think they are a big problem in the world, if at all. They aren't the company they were in the 90s. Gates has become one of the worlds most staggeringly successful humanitarians because of his direct effort and indirectly from the giving pledge, and it has redeemed him many times over again. Nadella seems like a decent person and truly great executive, and they have improved enormously as a company under him. I would probably work for them. But I don't have any problem with Google, either. What Microsoft does have is a vastly greater potential for abuse.
Buying a Tesla or something similar shouldn't be enough to very Exxon/Shell out of your life? Or you mean more abstractly? (E.g. the people transporting your food, mail, et al)
I genuinly wonder - what does go through the heads of those 100,000 very smart people that work at Google, many of them reading this forum, when they read a thread like this? Do they think 'oh it is HN again', do they discard this as irrelevant noise, do they know something that all the people posting here don't, do they still strongly believe in their mission, or do they get a gut-wrenching feeling that one day it may be all over? If you work at Google, please throw in your 2c.
I’ll be honest, mostly I just think that this is a very idealistic and naive reaction.
The world is extremely complicated and full of unfortunate realities that humanity just doesn’t have any solutions for.
There are people who can recognize that, and who try to do the best they can.
Then there are people who can’t recognize that, adopt an overly simplistic model of the problem and its environment, become convinced that there’s a simple and obvious solution, and then start attributing malice and blame to anyone who refuses to go along with their terrible idea.
I also think: “If they worked here they would know better.” The people here are by and large very good and thoughtful people genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and whatever negative feelings you have about how Google uses its power, if Google were gone it would create a power vacuum in the market that would be filled by companies that were 100x worse.
That’s how I feel about the mission and the morality of it all.
I also feel genuinely concerned for the future of anyone who would deprive themselves like this, as a vague form of protest that nobody ever notices, in the hopes that it might aggregate to something meaningful someday. That seems like a very ineffective and sad approach to living your life.
Don't know what you meant when you divided "people" into those two categories, but it's either truism or irrelevant.
Google is just a name, the point is it has a lot of power and even if a lot of people are "good" that doesn't mean they won't change, fuck up or be replaced at some point with a team that is less ethical. It's like it is with nukes. No one should have a weapon capable of such destruction.
I used to work there a couple years ago and honestly this seems a bit silly. People are at Google are pretty product focused.
Sure you can go and use the items on this list. But I don't think they will be better. Google has spent a lot of time and money to make a set of best in industry tools and people use them as a result.
Oh so they just don’t think about it at all. To be product focused is just to do what your boss tells you to do. Sometimes the easiest way to go about things is just to fully embody one’s role as a cog with no agency.
Usually irrelevant noise, I'm a realist - the company I work for is big, there will be people who oppose what it does, how it operates, even it's very existance. Granted there are genuine reasons why you'd want to cut bigtech out your life, it isn't an ambition I share.
To answer another part of your question - I strongly believe in my mission, I consider what I do at Google helps people, that said I'm not deluded, I'm partly helping to sell ads, but that doesn't detract from my primary objectives or the beneficial impact of my work.
At a minimum, I'm sure the the big paycheck and prestige would be enough to keep people's heads down and working, so they can focus on family and other things in life after work.
Not working at Google, but I guess many Google employees share my perspective:
1. I find most criticism of Google on HN either wrong or overblown. To clarify this point, I suggest you name the 5 worst things that come to mind about Google; I'll be happy to explain how I feel about them.
There is one significant moral issue I see with Google: they like to collect and hoard massive amounts of user data, and they have a lot of users so the resulting centralization of data creates a big risk. Note that the issue I see is "only" a risk. I'm not even sure what the concrete bad scenarios are that would make Google specially bad when the risk is realized, but I'm sure they exist.
2. I think they do a lot of good, which far outweighs the issue mentioned in point 1. Here are the 5 best things that come to mind right now:
- They do amazing good for open source. I have seen Google criticized for "paying lip service to open source" or worst, which I find laughable. They have published 3 open source operating systems (Chromium OS, AOSP, Fuchsia). They have created a huge number of very useful open source libraries I have been using for personal and professional project, from big ones like Flutter and gRPC to small ones like libyuv.
- Related: they do a lot of good for open standards. Case in point: their work on open, royalty-free video codecs, which has been a boon for open source. I have seen Google called evil on HN for this, which again harms the credibility of their detractors in my eyes. Even for Google Chat / Hangout / whatever, for which they got criticized a lot, I think it's fair to say they tried harder than all the other big players to make it work with an open standard before giving up.
- They have been a driving force for a more secure Internet: early use of https for webmail, 2-factor authentication, lately ubiquitous https...
- They have been leaders in giving users access to all their data, with the Data Liberation Front / Takeout.
- They are the most transparent when it comes to the privacy policies and collected data (for example I get prompts to check the policy whenever I do something in Incognito mode). And relaed to the previous point: the My Activity page is awesome! It helps realize what they collect on me, and it makes the collected data actually useful to the user. For example I used it to find a place I knew I had visited on a given day, though I had forgotten the name and location.
does it ever bother you to be building the next skynet? no hate, but I wonder if people @ google really think about what kind of world and future they are building with their actions...
Nothing really goes thru their heads. They are rational, not emotional and strongly believing in missions is an emotional response. They are estimating probabilities of how this is going affect the market, Google and them personally, and plan their moves accordingly. I doubt they have any emotional attachment to the company, and given how much they are in demand, they would barely notice if the company folds one day. Same story for investors: those are even more detached as they make rational investments often in competing companies. So nobody really cares, as you see.
Just how many parts of the stack does Google have its fingers in?
EDIT:
Consider this:
1. a user at home, wearing a Fitbit walks over to their computer, with their Nest camera recording their movements
2. they open their Chromebook, which uses Chrome OS
3. browses to their Gmail inbox with Chrome, and clicks on a link in one of their emails, sent by a friend using a Google Pixel phone running Android.
4. via their Fiber ISP
5. using Public DNS (8.8.8.8)
6. transfers between the US and Europe via the Grace Hopper subsea cable
7. transfers with HTTP/2 (based on SPDY)
8. to the website on the .dev TLD.
Google is in every step above. Thankfully the webpage doesn't use AMP, or Google would be in that step as well. And good thing it's not a page built on Angular, or hosted in Google Cloud...
Especially one that Google weren't even going to let the rest of us use (an entire "generic" top-level domain to use as a globally-routable in-house domain...) and only capitulated after it seemed like the pressure on ICANN might cause them to Do Something About That.
They quote from Google's application for .dev in 2013: "The proposed gTLD will provide Google with direct association to the term 'dev', which is an abbreviation of the word 'development'. The mission of this gTLD, .dev, is to provide a dedicated domain space in which Google can enact second-level domains specific to its projects in development."
(Google also added .dev to the HSTS preload list so browsers expect names in that domain to only be reachable via HTTPS, thus breaking in-house uses of .dev.)
> (Google also added .dev to the HSTS preload list so browsers expect names in that domain to only be reachable via HTTPS, thus breaking in-house uses of .dev.)
Anyone using .dev for that was already broken per the spec. There are TLDs for those cases, they are .test, .local and .invalid.
Repo owner here. The jmoore.dev domain is for my personal website. degoogle.jmoore.dev is linked as the website in my repo (https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle) but it is not the primary site I wish people to view it from.
To be quite honest I would prefer to not use GitHub either, but in the interest of easy collaboration GitHub is the optimal platform to manage the project from.
Don't get me wrong: I totally agree with the irony of using a Google TLD. But as @franksvalli said, I do not use AMP, Angular, or Google Cloud. Any tracking done on that page is from GitHub Pages that I do not have control over, unless I make my own auto mirror for that domain.
That's what I'd consider way too many extensions. For one reason, browser extensions with user bases sometimes get sold to malware/spyware companies, so even if they started out as good for you, they can become very bad for you, without you knowing. (There's a few browser extensions I'd be surprised if ever got sold, like uBlock Origin, but I don't know as much about most of the rest of them.)
Another thign to be aware of is that unusual combinations of filtering and other privacy-seeking behavior on the Web is usually detectable, and can permit you to be fingerprinted better than if you'd been using more common combinations. Though presumably most parties don't care enough to put the work into detecting that, I'd guess some subsets of users probably are targeted for at least experiments in this regard, such as Tor users. (I have this "problem" myself now, since I've been building a training/familiarization set of 10K+ Web request filtering rules, which I dogfood with uBlock Origin in Tor Browser, and the set is pretty unique to me. If I cared more about my immediate personal privacy, rather than on ongoing understanding of practical Web privacy&security, I wouldn't do all that counterproductive work, but would instead pick some popular stock stuff to run.)
It is pretty bad that they started Degoogle page with largely Google-unrelated privacy-focused extensions which break websites and sometimes do more harm than good. For example ClearURLs by default disables ETag header which is very important for caches to work. Yes, ETag can be used for tracking but there are many many more ways to "track" people and many definitions of tracking, installing such extensions won't fully protect them from all kinds of tracking. Instead, by installing extensions like this people end up with lots of websites broken and slow browsing experience and blame Firefox for lagging and unresponsiveness. How do I know? I have gone through all this. And I ended with only a few extensions - uBlock Origin, Neat URL, I don't care about cookies, ViolentMonkey, Stylus, Cookiebro, User agent switcher.
I especially don't recommend ClearURLs, Privacy Badger, Decentralays. Users or these are begging for problems [1]. Look at how bloated their code is. Prefer smaller extensions focusing on one thing only.
I use DDG for search full time and I’ve found that I need to use !g less and less often. For the times I do use !g I am finding myself increasingly disappointed in the results. I think Google is losing the war against spamdexing [1] and I think the search industry is ripe for disruptive innovation.
I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that eliminates a lot of spam and commercial sites to allow users to find small sites made by real people, just like in the early days of the web. I hope it’s not just a nostalgic impulse. I’m going to investigate it myself after I graduate.
Even after using DDG for the last 5-6 years, I find myself always using !g with it. So much that, it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily.
Sure, if I just care about US specific results and I am doing an exact term search or maybe StackOverflow result is my target, DDG comes close but Google gets context of things much better. I keep finding much better search results that had more context with my search. I don't know how to quantify/measure this but to me Google Search is still much better.
I've found personally, that nearly everyone of my DDG searches results in a subsequent Google search with more relevant data. It sucks too because I would rather use DDG on principle alone. I will agree, results in Google do seem worse, but until someone can give Google a run for their money they'll continue down the path they're currently on which is collect all the data for profit. Also, Yandex images, vastly superior.
DDG has been absolutely awful for me. Google has 15+ years of my search history at this point and the improvement that makes on my search results is incredible.
I agree that spamdexing is a huge problem, but could the rise of rel="nofollow" contribute just as much? The vast majority of user-generated content is marked as nofollow, but this is largely the same type of content that made early Google good. I often get better results doing a reddit search than using a search engine. It seems that by ignoring user-created links, search engines are ignoring 90-99% of the signal. The rest of the signal is mostly from commercial and promotional sites, so it's not surprising that these make up nearly all of the top search results.
I often do want results from commercial sites such as nginx.com, but I want results that real people have found valuable and not results that some paid blog post linked to.
If you put in a request to DDG to have entries linked to phrases removed from their search engine under EU GDPR or EU Right to be Forgotten, they will have an external law firm write back and tell you they get their results from Yahoo, Bing and other search engines and you need to contact those search engines direct. Google have actually been the fastest at getting my data out of their system, Microsoft never got back to me despite repeated requests, Facebook would rather believe Norfolk Constabulary instead of me despite being the copyright owner.
So many criminals control your life, most of you dont realise it.
I agree in some cases that the open source alternatives aren’t good enough, so I’ve done a mix of using things on this list, and switching to Apple alternatives (when needed). Got an iPhone, and using some of the Apple things has made it much easier.
I recently de-googled myself almost completely (still have a couple domain names with them, still use YouTube). Yeah Apple has their own issues going on too, but I am just happy to be mostly cut out from the Google madness.
Lightyears ahead, but are the alternatives good enough? I switched from using Gmail as the common landing spot for all of my email to Fastmail who in some ways is nowhere close to Gmail but in others are way ahead of Google. But above all else I know Fastmail isn’t running datamining programs on my email and contacts list to create and sell a marketing profile about me, and that is worth more to me than I’m paying them for email service.
They are mostly just producing office tools. Imagine that 50 years ago people said they couldn't stop using staplers and typewriters. Would a ban on these products really have doomed these people's lives and businesses?
[not op] Given that Microsoft/Apple/etc. aren't mentioned, G Suite has no real alternative other than Zoho (Note: nextcloud doesn't do email, so it's arguably not a GSuite competitor). This list would be better titled 'free/open-source alternatives to Google products' since excluding the other big companies extends past "de-google" and more into "open source living", if that's a good term for it.
It isnt just Google you need to cut out of your life, all the global corps are complicit in building the surveillance state.
Copyright laws means you cant check your chips on your devices have not become persistent backdoors into your system. You simply can not check the code. Goal posts will always be moved as you are Resource Burned fighting the system. Welcome to the Matrix Mr Anderson.
I would love to see a similar list for de-Apple-ing. Apple's anticompetitive and monopolistic practices with the App Store, the terrible direction MacBooks have taken, its price gouging on hardware... the list goes on. Google is saintly by comparison.
Apologies for running slightly off topic, but there's another way to look at this. The fact that Apple services like FaceTime and iMessage are restricted to Apple hardware means that those of us who haven't bought into this ecosystem encounter a fair amount of pressure to do so. So I think Apple's "saintly" behaviour is also self-serving.
You can avoid Apple by not using anything from Apple. Done.
That's how I lived for most of life when I still used Windows. Not one encounter with Apple. Now, I haven't used anything from Microsoft for 10 years until they bought GitHub.
But you'll always be feeding Google just by visiting completely unrelated third-party websites.
Google (like Facebook) fits most definitions of cancer, creeping into places where it doesn't belong.
Apple has done a lot of good for users and has amazing products, and they have yet to annoy me as much as Microsoft did and Google do, so I will continue to be a user and a developer for their platforms.
Personally I'm not looking to stop using their services completely but I am trying to make sure they can't cripple my life by locking me out of my Google account. The chance is low because I haven't personally released anything on any of their platforms or don't depend on any service of theirs for my livelihood, I'm just your normal passive Google user.
My plan:
- use a custom domain for my email (actually done this already)
- switch to Fastmail instead of Gmail
- update all services I have signed up for
- remove any important docs off of Google drive and either switch to sync.com (they have E2E encryption) or use syncthing
- I've already started using syncthing to sync my keepassxc DB between all my devices
- start monthly backups of the rest of my Google drive but still continue to use it (this includes all my Google Photos as well) onto a local NAS (which I have yet to buy, suggestions welcome)
- I've already switched to FireFox on both desktop and Android as my main browser but I still use Chrome as well, just more for work
I still plan on using Google products but I just want to make sure if they go away or if their algorithm mistakingly decides one day that I've violated something and locks me out without recourse that I'm not totally screwed.
Several months ago I took small steps towards this direction.
It started with downloading Firefox on desktop and web. I love Firefox mobile. It's performant and supports multiple tabs. Also comes in Dark Mode.
Next came email, which was difficult. I'm still transitioning. Protonmail was my pick because of the price point and ProtonCalendar (currently in beta). Gmail and Gcal are deeply integrated and wanted an alternative that could offer a similar experience. The only con here is that ProtonCalendar is web only (please support on mobile soon, Protonmail!).
Duckduckgo is a solid search alternative. Results are quality. Between these services, browsing is a joy again.
The easiest, laziest way to remove google from your life is too simply stop using services as they shut them down. Instead of transferring from play music to YouTube music (play music is shutting down sometime after October, according to an email I got yesterday), I'm looking at setting up funkwhale or some other self-hosted music service (maybe just nextcloud? Not sure yet).
Dont just drop Google and switch to another large company or service. Take the chance and set up your own infrastructure!
One reason why our web became so successful is Decentralization. But, in recent years I feel like we are heading to more and more centralized web, where only a few big companies control the entire ecosystem. Take email and instant messaging as an example. Everybody can maintain it's own, independent mail service, but everybody can still communicate with each other. On the other hand there are very few messaging services that are totally incompatible to each other. Depending on where you live, you might only use iMessage, Whatsapp or WeChat. Even tough it may be technically possible to use other services like Signal or Threema, you are most definitively going to experience a lot inconveniences. In my personal bubble only very few use these apps and as if that were not enough, these few users are also distributed across a wide variety of different services. If it were like mail, everybody could use his/her preferred messaging system and still talk to each other.
Thats only one example and I dont want our web to be like Whatsapp in a few years from now. So I encourage everybody to try and use his own infrastructure. You are also going to learn quite a bit while doing so.
>> Take email and instant messaging as an example. Everybody can maintain it's own, independent mail service, but everybody can still communicate with each other.
It is easier said than to be done. I was hosting my own email for a long time and with the current state of play it is not as easy to provide the same UX as Gmail or Outlook. Even AWS struggles to provide an email solution that is worth switching over.
Yes, thats definitely right. But you could also switch to a paid service, that is caring about you and your data. Then you still need to trust that service and the people behind it, but it may be better than Google and co. I use Protonmail with a custom domain (my name) for example. I pay a few dollars every year, but in return I get state-of-the-art encryption for all my mails, data protection, more privacy and I also trust the people behind it.
I read a story where someone lost access to their google account and had to go through living hell to get the access back. Reaching a human for support was outright impossible.
Privacy was not that big a deal for me, but if I had lost access to my email for any reason, I would have had zero rights to demand what is mine - because nothing is really mine, as I have never paid for the service, so I was never a customer to begin with.
I moved off gmail last year after using it since 2004 (I remember getting an invite and using the service even before it was launched).
I mean honestly, I don't mind that as long as it isn't a problem concerning recovering your account after an account takeover. If a potential hijacker can't get into my account through social engineering, great.
I tried. I failed. I returned. Google is like Gravity. It would be awesome to escape it, but it’s expensive, impractical, and sooner or later, you will be back where you where. :(
I'm stuck with Gmail. Getting the services I have free would probably be unaffordable with any other service; I've got two legacy free Google apps accounts; one has 500 users available with 4 domaine and several subdomains (about 20 active users and 40 inactive). The other has 100 users available, and is used for my personal/family use. I can't see getting this kind of service free anywhere. Not to mention, there's purchased apps from the play store (and other services) on some if these accounts that aren't easily transferred elsewhere.
Great comment :) What beats one body gravity is bigger body's gravity. I escaped to Apple few years ago, except search. Safari should have custom search engine setting, though. Is it missing because of the deal with Google for default engine?
My solution is to put my eggs in different baskets as much as possible. Using Chrome on iPhone, backups on Dropbox, etc. Although to be fair, not a lot of baskets has remained these days.
You think that all baskets are equally bad, hence the approach to separate data. I say follow the money. Apple gets its money from consumers buying devices, Google from businesses buying ads, MS from businesses, buying MS because, well...
Now, who has the best incentive to protect consumer's data?
I checked both Mac and iOS, its a fixed list, no option to add SearX for example. Funny enough, Yandex is missing from MacOS list (only options are Google, Yahoo, Bing and DDG), but present in iOS.
I have been using Duck duck go for few months now. Never missed Google. Slowly I will shift other services as well.
It's a matter of societal good that we degoogle. Else Google will become strongest company ever created by mankind.
I've been using DDG for more than a year. Just switched back a day or two ago. I just got sick of the terrible results. I don't know if Google got better or DDG/Bing got worse. A few months ago I started comparing search results and the Google ones where better and the other day I just couldn't handle doing double searches anymore.
It's not just spam, using Google puts you into a bubble. Now, the search team will tell you they're doing it to curate the results to present high-quality information, but it's still a bubble in the end. It's very harmful if you're trying to understand what other people are thinking and seeing without filters.
Google Voice is the hardest service for me to replace. I don't see any alternatives on this list. I appreciate that they let me seamlessly send and receive calls and texts from my Android phone or my desktop. I have a hard requirement that my phone should be optional for all parts of my communication workflow.
You got me curious (I don't use Google Voice, but my dad has for a very long time) and I started to search around. It looks like all the alternatives are either expensive or shitty. :/
Edit: The universally accepted "best" seems to be Grasshopper[1] which is $29/mo or $26/mo billed annually ($312/yr).
Google Voice also works if you have internet access, but not mobile network connectivity, and it works while overseas to provide a fully-functional US phone number (you do have to use a standard paid US mobile number to set it up, but do not need to retain it afterward).
> you do have to use a standard paid US mobile number to set it up, but do not need to retain it afterward
If someone else registers Google voice with that number, you're going to have a hard time. It'll be removed from your account, and you can't use Google voice without a US phone number.
Don't know if it is still the case, but for $25 one time fee (much less than one month of average phone bill) you could port your number into Google Voice, and keep it forever, at least until Google shutters Google Voice (which they likely won't, because it's such an incredible spying device).
Same. I could probably de-Google pretty quickly—my primary email is on my own domain now—were it not for Google Voice, which I rely on daily. And since I have to rely on it, might as well use the rest of Google's services, since they're so damn convenient.
Am I the only one left in the world who actually likes Google and has a positive opinion of them?
I remember switching from AltaVista to Google and thinking they're much better. I remember a friend forwarding me an invitation to join GMail on its first beta day and how impressed I was with the 2.2 GB storage. I remember switching to Google Chrome when I read about its beta release on Slashdot. It was much faster than Firefox.
Personally, the company I loved to hate was Microsoft, and for me Google was the good guy.
Question to those who hate Google - are you old or young? Have you used the Internet in the 90s, before Google came? Have you used email where you lose your emails once you exceed the 20MB capacity, and you need to pay money to increase it? Have you used Internet Explorer because it was everywhere?
I'm not young and I remember the times when Google replaced Alta Vista and then Hotmail (and released Wave).
I don't think people forgot about those days, but mostly think that the Google they liked has kicked the bucket. (Google's motto was "Don't be evil" those days, remember? It was removed from the code of conduct in 2018).
I think today, Google (together with Facebook and friends) is actively harming the open internet we loved. So, yes, we see what Google has replaced, but I don't think that is enough to worship a corporation forever.
I stand corrected. Wikipedia says "In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence." Thank you.
But I think my point remains valid. Google's "attitude" changed dramatically in the recent years and we are just responding to that.
Corporations tend to lose the original good feelings of their founders.
On the other end, people is coming to recognize, more and more, the value of privacy. To understand that "I have nothing to hide" is a meaningless phrase in this context.
What can we do?
The primary thing is to always pay attention and be vigilant towards those to whom we give our data. Even if it's very difficult, being the tracking so pervasive nowadays, even for us HN' readers.
Another palliative is to split our data among different cloud vendors, in order not to let anyone have all your information.
In my opinion, at the end, we should use more paid services.
Most of your positives are more than 10 years old. In the meantime they've remove the "Don't be evil" motto, their Android/Chromebook support is very short lived, they've killed countless services people relied on, ...
I don't think Google is evil like Microsoft was in the 90s but I don't blindly trust them as I might have done in the past.
Yes, but it is no longer their "motto" (the guiding principle for the company). So, it appearing in the CoC does not mean that it's the guiding principle.
But I think you are raising a good point. Why is this piece of "misinformation" being spread so much? What do you think? I think it is because it corresponds to people's experience with Google: "an entity once liked by the users and did good deeds has quit doing those." So, it may be "misinformation" as you put it, but I don't think it bears no value.
I use Zoho mainly for email but some other services as well. I like it very much but it cannot rival G suite or Office365 yet. Website states that it can though so their experience might be different. Text editor and spreadsheet app are way slower than both Google and Microsoft solutions.
Perfect timing, was just about to start migration.
My plan so far:
- Gmail -> Fastmail + custom domain
- GDrive -> Nextcloud + openoffice (it's really nice, includes notes and libreoffice)
- Chrome -> Firefox (FF made a tremendous progress in last 5 years)
- Google -> DuckDuckGo
No disrespect to Google, the whole platform is very convenient, but it's going to be a fun experiment to use services that are dedicated to one goal (email-only, storage-only b2, search only etc)
The only one I look to stop spending time at is YouTube, hard to replace, however bloggers have to start protecting their value and own their things.
Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient?
EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to deliver relevant vacuum cleaner ads, I don't care. I block them anyway.
People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Everyone is tracking you online, but for some reason we only care about it when its companies that make good products that we like to use. Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? Meanwhile, I had an ad in my gmail yesterday for Google Fi, sign up today, its super easy! Except I already have google fi. Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).
>People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way.
The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if history is anything to go by, the signs will have been flashing for a while.
You could just switch at that point, I suppose, and hope that something in the last 15 years of emails, chats, your entire contact network and your location history doesn't incriminate you along with the fact that you just switched.
Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way?
I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
There are providers (not free, though), like ProtonMail, who store your data encrypted, in a fashion that would prevent this threat model.
I bet that Google would sooner gladily erase itself all of its data rather than give them to a fascist gov (seems that they cooperated mildly in the past, but not with a fascist government, with a normal one). They already took tough decisions like to ditch Chinese market, under pressure of the employees. Yes Google is clearly leftist, ecolo, all you want, as they are just the sum of their engineers. Great minds.
No, you're not fucked either way. In fact, if you're white, middle class, etc. you're probably better off than most and will be given the most leeway.
If your data on google/facebook/microsoft/amazon servers is kept to the bare minimum (& kept innocuous), if you self host and if you keep your data on smaller services your chances of getting caught up in a dragnet operation are minimized. Your chances of having an elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized.
They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that.
When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable.
My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages.
It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc.
It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another.
What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails.
When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.
>What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be.
It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desirability.
DC won't sent somebody to Minnesota because of what you wrote in a gmail alone. However, what you wrote in gmails would likely contribute to a "social scoring system" which would be used against you.
I both agree and disagree with you at the same time.
Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it.
If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.
When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark.
However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk.
HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH.
It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over.
For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.
My thought is that if fascist government takes over, Minnesota at first would be something like Hong Kong. It is not like social scoring could/would happen overnight. At first you would need a lot of people to believe in it, a lot of people to support it and etc.
I understand that things would not so simple of course.
My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.
That's why individial self-hosting isn't a good defense - it only works if it's widespread. If half the population uses GenericPrivateITservice then the government can't crack down on those users.
People "opting in" to privacy systems can't work, that's why it needs to be solved politically.
Risk is not only an estimate of the extent of harm if something happens but the likelihood of it happening, hence they're not prepping for Doomsday - which would be fairly pointless - but worse case scenario, of which there are several vying for the title of worst case, each with varying chance.
I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.
I've never understood people who stock up on baked beans and hide in bunkers either.
You're right though. Maybe between the people who have facebook accounts they used to say bad stuff about dictator du jour and those who don't have facebook accounts at all they'll definitely go after the latter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And, maybe there won't ever be a fascist dictatorship in the United States. After all, right wing populism is getting more and more unfashionable these days.
When people are saying they legally kill other people for their political views, that's often a fake. What often happens, no one cares about political views, people just using the tool for profit, revenge, career, or lulz.
Nothing stops me from registering a free e-mail address garbagetime @ somedomain.com, writing any e-mails I want there, then letting your government know about your secret e-mail address you use to discuss politics.
I thought the point of the internet is that it removes, to an extent, the friction of distance, meaning that the circles you move in may not be local to you. In the past, if I wanted to chat about politics I would have to do it with someone local or someone face to face. The postal service removed some of that friction, and now there is far less friction than that.
I doubt your neighbours will know much about your politics unless they're your Facebook friends too, and why would you add your neighbours to Facebook when you can speak to them face to face? (and do you?)
> The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations".
Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.
Do you think a fascist government could actually come to power if they had to exploit the 15 largest tech companies? We're in an oligopoly, the 15 tech companies have far more power than any president.
IMO: I'm not sure I want the 15 largest tech companies having as much policy influence across the globe as they do. For that reason, it may be reasonable to 1) resist them, 2) encourage others to resist them.
Ads can be contextual, served based on the content you view, and Google's own Ad Words does in fact just that, as they serve ads based on your search keywords, and that's their biggest revenue source.
People have issues with user profiling, tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google does it too btw, with AdSense.
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> Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each?
This is a false choice.
Also, I already pay for YouTube Premium to avoid YouTube's ads. I would gladly pay for a subscription that stopped ads in Google's Search too.
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> Google's ad service literally couldn't check my gmail account against google fi accounts (apparently).
That's irrelevant.
The danger isn't in Google serving you with more relevant ads, the danger is in that data being collected in the first place, linked to your persona.
And contrary to what other HNers say, no, we don't need to wait for a fascist regime in the US to see the dangers of doing that.
China is targeting political activists and they can coerce any company operating within their borders. Being gay or an atheist already puts your life in danger in many parts of this world. Etc.
But OK, say you don't live in those countries. How about the story of that father finding out his daughter is pregnant from the ads being served [1]. And what would you say if your credit score dropped due to your Facebook activity? Or your insurance prices were affected by those who you befriend online?
There are some real, contemporary consequences of user profiling that go beyond Google knowing if you already own a google fi or not ;-)
In this case you don't need to ditch Gmail, they don't use anymore this data to custom ads. However each time you visit any website, your enemies are not only Google Ads but also Criteo, Facebook, etc (and they are much much less conscientious than Google about how they use and distribute the fruits of this harvest).
I agree. But I still think it's worth it to ditch Gmail, or at least the free version.
People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it.
If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite and your own domain.
I have my own domain, it's paid for 10 years in advance, I host my email at Fastmail, but if I get unhappy with Fastmail, I can change the email provider in an hour.
> People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way.
Besides all the hypothetical horror scenarios I have one argument that at least for me is strong: I just don't want them to track me. In some cases (like posting this comment) I accept the tradeoff, but I want to be able to choose.
These sort of evasive techniques are about allowing people who want to make that choice for themselves to also have a choice of participating in modern life.
No, we care when those companies are giant multinational monopolies.
Think of it this way. I walk into a mom & pop clothing store, and one of the sales people on the floor takes note into a little pad the items of clothing I touched, so that they might optimise their purchasing.
Contrast that to one person from one of the worlds largest companies, following me at home, work, the shops, the pub, the bedroom, tallying up all the things I do so that they might broker that information to commercial interests, or more nefariously, to further cement their choke-hold on the ever-increasing industries which they've a financial stake in.
One of those situations is clever business, the other is an Orwellian hellscape.
I'll take every opportunity I can to rid myself of that second pursuer, thank you very much.
In either case I still bought my slacks from the clothing store, my pint from the tavern, and slept soundly in my bed. You object to the company having your information, I object to it being used to impact my life. I don't give a damn about them just having it.
And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
Alphabet uses this information to expand its influence, be it soft power, political power, or economic power.
For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on.
Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it.
I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day.
> Alphabet uses this information to expand its influence, be it soft power, political power, or economic power.
All companies do this, not just Alphabet, all large companies have PR guys, all large companies have lobbyists.
>For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
AMP and all of the other Google servies don't control access to information, they just collect it. You can find every political view under the sun on Google, and if you don't like that for some reason you can use Bing or DDG or whatever floats your boat. But with the exceptions of platforms with explicit moral agendas like DDG, all those other service options are collecting your data too.
>But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
I'm deeply unconvinced of this, corporations are made up of regular ol folk just like you and me. I've worked for the government and corporations, and underneath the politics and the branding they're all just people. I would need someone to demonstrate a clear motivation and mechanism for why and how the people at Google are going to start harming others.
> In either case I still bought my slacks from the clothing store, my pint from the tavern, and slept soundly in my bed. You object to the company having your information, I object to it being used to impact my life. I don't give a damn about them just having it.
>And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
For the store metaphor, consider Amazon instead of Google. Amazon tracked sale data from its vendors then used that data to generate its own product line, competing (or outright replacing) the original vendors. You might look at this as a neutral "how does this affect me?" matter, but this puts the multitudes of other vendors/manufacturers out of business, and your own employer might be among their numbers one day. Even if not, the fact that it's harming so many others, and that you happen to not be in that group, doesn't mean Amazon's data collection doesn't do harm, or that you couldn't be taking steps to prevent that harm.
In the case of google, the harm isn't as clear cut as in Amazon's case, and it isn't quite as direct or imminent. Whereas Amazon's data is very concentrated (purchasing and retail browsing habits), Google's data is broad and allows for tracking almost every aspect of a person's life: location throughout the day, personal conversations, browsing habits, purchasing, plans of all sorts.
Their having this data on its own isn't harmful, but as others have noted, it represents harm in the sense of what how it _could_ be used if applied maliciously. This includes government actions, data leaks/hacks, Google abusing the data, etc. The potential consequences of each of those can be explored with tremendous depth in their own right, but that's not important for this conversation. What's important is that it allows for harm, even if the chance for that harm seems low, whether on a global level (it impact everyone) or on a local level (it has impact on individual people).
There's also the consideration that some services you use may be impacting other's privacy as well. You might not be concerned about Google reading your emails, but your email partners might be more averse to this tracking. If they are to exchange an email with you, they have no choice but expose that conversation to Google.
Consider what's going on in Belarus. They shut down the internet, but what if instead the government started demanding data from Google or Facebook to identify and track down members of the opposition? I think we all understand that such events as Belarus aren't a daily occurrence, but with persistent data stores, the opportunity for harm only needs to occur once.
>this puts the multitudes of other vendors/manufacturers out of business, and your own employer might be among their numbers one day
This is basic capitalism, Amazon built a better mouse trap. The rise of the internet destroyed those businesses, Amazon is just the name that got attached to a business model that was inevitable. Now we can debate the values of capitalism, but Amazon the company isn't the problem, if not them it would just be someone else. The unfortunate fact of progress in capitalistic society is that some jobs disappear, we don't have many loom operators today either.
>Their having this data on its own isn't harmful, but as others have noted, it represents harm in the sense of what how it _could_ be used if applied maliciously
This seems to be the crux of the issue, the idea that the data's very existence is somehow a threat. I don't buy the vague handwavey "bad government" versions are valid, if the government has fallen to fascist ideology then Google knowing your step counts and favorite coffee shop are the least of your problems.
And I don't worry about Google falling into some Orwellian nightmare for the same reason I don't worry about the government falling into it, Google is just a bunch of people. On average, they're going to be reasonable people who think using the data to bust down the doors of private citizens and harm them is bad. More importantly I fail to see how it makes shareholders any money to pursue that course of action.
>They shut down the internet, but what if instead the government started demanding data from Google or Facebook to identify and track down members of the opposition?
The Inquisition and the Nazis managed this just fine without Google. If you're relying on privacy to keep you safe from fascists, bigots, nationalists, and hate you're going to have a bad time. Those people don't care about your privacy, and if they can't get the information from Google they'll get it from your neighbors, your friends, or from you by introducing a tire iron to your knee caps.
The fight against fascism starts way earlier than when they start searching for individuals to disappear. If a society reaches that point, the presence or absence of Google won't save you.
That had nothing to do with tracking. Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used. Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
> Cambridge Analytica was able to gain access to large amounts of data that people had created while using Facebook as it is intended to be used.
That's debatable. CA either bent the rules or broke the rules to get a lot of that info. In many cases, CA was able to get not just the target's info, but all of their friends info too. Facebook was either incompetent or complicit in allowing this to happen.
> Even if no one was being tracked, the exploitation could have occurred.
What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?
> What do you mean? How could CA work without any data?
Tracking, in this context, means tracking behavior across other websites. CA got data that was created simply by having a Facebook account and friending other people (they used oauth/login with Facebook). Facebook would have to not have existed, or not provide as much data to third party applications, to prevent their collection.
I think it 's part of controlling the narrative. What if the big corps were actually behind the fetishization of and obsession with privacy and data collection? What if it acts as a distraction or cover for whatever other negative initiatives they might take? If they can control the opposition to focus on "privacy and my data versus big corp" it's a win. I think controlled opposition is an essential part of narrative management and PR strategy for entities that are large or sophisticated enough.
Here’s an analogy I like to use for people who don’t care about privacy; Its similar to not caring about free speech just because you have nothing to say. It’s not just about you the regular joe who is of no particular interest to companies/governments but about those people who absolutely need it.
You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this case Google) have not only yours but everyone’s data. It’s astonishing what you can do with just some metadata. You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
You’re not just giving them your uninteresting data you’re also giving them an enormous amount of power.
> You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
Right, so, has Google done this? Asking because from what I remember the answer has been largely no, but I remember FB selling data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016.
Even this commonly parroted "fact" isn't true. Cambridge Analytica exploited a Facebook misfeature that let them scrape a frankly ridiculous amount of data from users who took their quiz thing. Certainly Facebook shouldn't have allowed random apps access to this user data, but straight up selling data would be an act of immense incompetence on Facebook's part. Their whole business is keeping the data to themselves and selling access to targeted advertising based on that data.
Business is booming for Google right now. Imagine Google still have all of that data but are slowly going bankrupt and desperate for new business ideas.... and then Google is approached by a company with ethics and practices like Cambridge Analytica?
(Preface - agreeing with you) - And we really can't know it, either. There's some "evidence" that they're willing to tweak search results in favor of their politics of the day but I'd even take that with a grain of salt - mostly because of the original problem: Google is not transparent.
It has always worked out well for us to give power to completely opaque entities right? Guys? Guys?
I think what matters is whether you trust them or not. I do care about privacy, so I don't leak information that I care about on random websites, only trust entities. For me, Google is one of the company I trust, just like some people trust DDG, Mozilla, Fastmail...
>Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient?
Someone tries to access your account from a random place, or maybe an old camera video you uploaded to youtube gets flagged erroneously by some contentid or appropriate content automation, and an automated system locks your account permanently, with you forever losing access to your emails and files. And not being allowed to use google services ever again without breaking ToS.
You can backup your data but the big fear that caused me to move off was GMail. When Google drops the ban hammer on any of its services (eg. YouTube for using too many emojis) it does it at the Google account level which kills everything. Even worse I've also seen reports Google continues to accept new email and the sender has no knowledge that you're locked out and unable to respond.
Accepting this is setting a precedent that you're happy for companies with a lot of power to have efficient systemic influence. This has already (it's barely been 10/20 years) started to influence the outcome of elections. Literally the cornerstone of a functioning democracy. And you're saying you don't care.
Information distributors do more than influence elections, they completely control them.
Walter Cronkite impeached Nixon, Pulitzer and Hearst started the Spanish-American war, and FAANG companies, directly or indirectly, nudge the needle on elections. I don't see how Google is unique or notable in this regard.
>It's not unique in this regard, therefore it doesn't matter? Is that your argument?
Yes. Any group that controls information distribution controls what we know about the world. By controlling what we know about the world, they control politics completely. This is axiomatic, there is no way around it, you can't personally observe everything that happens therefore you must have it reported to you. The person or people doing that reporting control your worldview. Google isn't bad for playing a role in that information economy.
>Also, comparing the relative power of newspaper men to Google doesn't make much sense.
You're right, the newspaper and television men of yore were far more powerful than Google is or ever will be. More Americans watched Cronkite than watch all evening network news combined today, and 70% of the people who watched him trusted that his was factual reporting.
No news source in the world today has that kind of trust, definitely not Google.
> Yes. Any group that controls information distribution controls what we know about the world. By controlling what we know about the world, they control politics completely.
I agree, so I want to deny as much information and power to powerful institutions as possible and diversify my relationships with them such that it becomes less likely that any one could become the Kingmaker.
With standard media because of its mass audience nature, it's easier to see how they influence people. The mass acceptance of the internet has started to push traditional media out but replaced it with incredibly personalised and thus a more effective version that is yet to have proper legal regulations in place.
My personal thing with Google and "convenience" is that the convenience is with just a low barrier to entry. Once you set up your own workflow with "Google alternatives", the convenience factor disappears.
One argument I'd make is that it creates a race to the bottom. The fact they have a near search monopoly along with their data collection means they milk the highest amount of revenue per search compared to other search engines by a long margin.
To compete with that, other engines would need to be at least as aggressive in their data collection as well as trying to gain market share.
Obviously any other engine who uses principles like privacy as part of their mission are at an inherent disadvantage. Search engines can return meaningful adverts pretty much based on keywords used and location searched from- there isn't a "need" for all the other tracking and data collection other than profit.
I think the biggest problem is Google becoming a monopoly, when you rely daily on tens of their services. Than, if for some reason, they decide to close your account or use your data to "be evil", there's not much you can do.
Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? I agree this would be a huge problem, but I'd be similarly devastated if my ISP stopped doing business with me, or any other email provider if I wasn't on gmail.
True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. That seems like a risk you take just by doing business with third-parties at all.
I remember seeing a few cases of Google account de-activation every year. Not sure how often it happens, but it does happen. I personally use Gmail and really like it, I don't expect to have any problems with them, but I do know that my account being deleted at some point for no reason is a real possibility.
I think that email is a bigger problem as it's the main connection between you and all the other services you use online. Lose your email address? You're going to have a hard time recovering the accounts on all the other services.
I totally agree with this point, it absolutely does happen. It's just every time I investigate a given incident further it is either:
A) A clear ToS violation where Google is completely in the right with the suspension
B) An engineering error that is fixed in a day or two.
Which puts Google in the same camp as every other tech company I do business with, and every other email provider for that matter. Moreover, given the hundreds of millions if not billions of gmail users and only handful of suspension stories, I'm probably less likely to face suspension on Gmail than other platforms.
The risk with Google is that (if you're like most of us), you're likely to be using several of their services. If you're flagged in any one of those services (for whatever reason), you run the risk of losing access to all of their services at once - including Gmail.
"I uploaded a YouTube video, which was a normal video in my eyes.. that got removed for inappropriate content and got my account disabled. Now my access to the gmail address is blocked"
Being banned from Youtube because you violated their TOS is one thing. Losing access to Gmail at the same time, because everything is linked to the same Google account? That's excessive.
That's a fair criticism, and perhaps a good reason to not use Gmail. But that's not an arbitrary deactivation, and it doesn't support totally avoiding Google in all things.
Can you be more specific? I see two links that are directly related to account suspension on the front page of DDG. One related to Newpipe, where the comments on HN call it out as a likely troll, and another with a dead link.
There's a Richard Feynman quote from the Challenger postmortem: absence of a particular kind of failure in the past doesn't guarantee absence of the same kind of failure in the future.
All services have arbitrary usage agreements and can terminate your account at any time if some automated system is triggered, or even if a human makes the wrong call.
> what's the least pain way to have your own domain fronting an email service provided by someone else?
If you're asking about moving from Gmail to protonmail, your best bet is to set up forwarding from Gmail and go through your most important accounts to change the email.
Your question is obviously irrelevant. Whether or not they have flagrantly abused the power is irrelevant.
What is relevant is whether or not they could, how easy it would be to do so, how damaging it could be, and what protections we would have once they have done so. This is the threat presented by internet monopolies and their fetish for violating our privacy.
Also consider that no company has managed to stay on top indefinitely. Once their growth slows, and they become desperate to appease shareholders, what won't they do to make that happen?
Long after fads have changed, supposed benevolent coding wunderkinds have moved on, the troves of data will still be there, ripe for the MBA's, the lawyers, the mitt romney's, god knows who, to leverage.
The argument "they've been nice about it so far, so why shouldn't we keep doing it?" is a fucking joke.
"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I feel like we have to re-learn the lessons of history every few decades. These things have never worked out well for us in the past and yet despite thousand of historical examples, in every generation or three, a not-small group of people arises swearing that this time is different.
Literally the only way to protect humanity from itself is to prevent the concentration of power and here we are, doing it again.
If you have no problem with Google's stranglehold on advertising, their role in the demise of local news, brick and mortar business, local economies, and every other way they have contributed to the decline of the internet ... then by all means, enjoy the convenience.
I don't see how those things as connected to Google. If AskJeeves had won the search wars the all of those things would still happen. Your problem seems to be with capitalism not with Google.
Maybe I should have asked, "Why do you care?" Absolutely I made the comment with the intention to debate. The points we're discussing here are all moral and speculative, there is no cut and dry right answer.
In those cases I find good faith debate to be the best way to expand my view on the subject, even if I don't end up "budging", at least I understand all the positions a little better.
It’s not the data collection that made me want to leave, it’s:
1) your account can randomly disappear so you shouldn’t depend on it. Not just for political reasons but things like password reset using a heuristic that can fail leaving you permanently locked out.
2) the abusive anticompetitive behavior was starting to affect me directly.
3) very recently google has started deleting private data containing content they don’t like
If you leave over just the data collection that’s extremely noble IMO. In most cases that’s something that affects everyone around you more than it affects you.
I've heard many stories of Google accounts being terminated without the possibility of appeal due to some minor terms of service breach in one of their peripheral services.
It’s not about Google. It’s to demonstrate that in certain situations you wouldn’t say that so confidently, and that your assumptions are based on something very fragile, something that large-scale needle-nudging could have an influence on in your lifetime.
Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the fathers of AI, wrote one of the better treatments of the possible future of computer-based data systems in his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society". In it, he addresses concerns:
The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:
Whether or not it's possible to transact genocide at similar scale without computerised data records, it's quite clearly far easier to do so with them. Worse, with comprehensive records and rapid identification of any particular meddlesome priest, activist artist, or woman who was warned but nevertheless persisted, it's possible for such regimes, state or non-state, to dip in and retaliate with pinpoint effectiveness. Even the mere suggestion that this is possible can be extraordinarily chilling.
For one, Google could identify you since on Chrome you might have your name, address, and phone number saved for auto-fill, and sell your information to companies. They could sell your information to a certain company if their AI identifies you, for example, as a left-wing elderly male. I think the recent documentary that got deleted off Youtube explains it.
Google also censors results a lot compared to Yahoo and DuckDuckGo so you'll mostly get popular sites. An example is how when I searched "youtube deleted documentary" Yahoo and DuckDuckGo got the right results but Google didn't.
For Youtube, it dominates video uploading so it can delete and censoring things easily and all you can do is complain.
But what you typed is not nonsense. Much like this, e.g. I don't care what you think :)
If we all cared about what every other hackernews user wrote ... We'd probably go a wee bit mad. Certainly my thumbs would be side from responding to y'all
Global warming affects every person on Earth, I don't think Google's data collection negatively affects a single digit percent of their customers, much less the majority. I don't get the comparison.
If a company is based in an "X eyes" nation", but the product is A) self-hosted and B) open source, does it matter that the organization the develops it is based in an "X eyes" nation?
The risk is much lesser, but there's the possibility of poisoning the binaries or release package.
There's also the whole "just because open source allows people to review code doesn't mean that they do" problem, but I don't expect that attack vector to be used by state actors because it would make the beneficiary of the attack too obvious to the public.
I don't think it matters if the product is selfhosted and opensource. That said, in my circles, people are wary about deploying software from specific countries even if they are selfhosted and opensource. I think part of the issue is that docker is the preferred more of deployment these days and sometimes it's not clear what does into the docker image (i.e when you don't build your own images, which you always should)
I never considered a Gmail alternative since Gmail has primary/social/promotion/updates tabs and proper threading of replies and almost perfect spam protection. What services do the above things as good?
Tabs work flawlessly for me. It takes a little bit of time to get used to what goes where, and you can only use a subset of them, but in general, I love promotional emails being separate, so i can unsubscribe from them all in one place, that's my favorite.
Love the tabs, but the threading is such a PITA thanks to their convoluted interface. Every time I want to selectively reply and change the subject line, I have do do a minor research project to figure it out.
Yahoo! Mail has one really cool feature: It supports actual browser-like tabs. So, it is possible to open multiple email conversations in parallel, as well as run some searches, and look at various folders.
They haven’t gotten much love on this site but I recently switched to hey.com after being a gmail user since beta in 2004 and couldn’t be happier. I like the “feed” for newsletter-y things (with a neat scroll to preview messages view) and the paper trail for transactions. There’s also something empowering about the simple “thumbs up” “thumbs down” screening queue for new senders.
I will say, however, that I never realized just how infrequently I receive mail that actually warrants my attention (let alone a reply) and that feels sort of lonely in a funny way.
Does a service being part of the “5-eyes” really mean anything? I mean, this list makes it sound like being in China is a better alternative than being in Canada.
There was a time period where people were trying to use/put services in Iceland or Switzerland because they weren’t part of a known default sharing arrangement and people completely relied on poor interpretations of laws acting like the government took a completely hands off approach to data. The reality is that absent a treaty, these places can all choose respond to foreign warrants and often times do.
China and Russia being notably separate from the rest of the world, and also large areas.
In your mind, how was the last paragraph relevant to the other country thing?
But the answer is yes they can be forced, absolutely. All countries have more to lose with the US (not that there is an ideological line in the sand, countries willingly cooperate with FBI, which is instructed by Congress to handle foreign investigations as well) and this is exactly what has played out in case after case after case.
Depends on the service and whether you are trying to hide from somebody who can issue a warrant or you are just trying to hide from corporations who sell your data. Also depends upon the level of encryption. For example, spider oak can hand over encrypted blocks of data if served a warrant but can’t tell even what your file names are in those encrypted blobs.
It depends entirely on your thread model. If you're trying to avoid persecution by one of the 5-eyes and not any of the others, then yes, obviously it matters. For example, for dissidents, leakers, activists, etc. Having someone else spy on you who doesn't care about you and what you're doing isn't as big of a deal in such cases.
The real promise of the semiconductor revolution which made it simple for almost every human being to literally own computing machines which are more powerful than supercomputers of a few decades back is the promise of entirely owning ALL your data and performing your own computations locally and merely communicating with other peers by means of dumb pipes.
Just changing from Google to N does nothing towards this goal, and we're now even further away from the promise of a decentralised Internet than ever before I believe.
Wake me up when a non-tech user can spin up an email server the same way they can open a browser and and send emails to any other person on the net. And with phones being powered on 24x365, one would think the dream of being a home server would be easier than ever...
But of course this way promises no money/profit for businesses in general. Or at least less so, since vendor-lock in and data monetisation would be much more difficult if not impossible.
I am currently running a degoogled Android phone. Hardest part has been mapping -- OsmAnd lacks many points of interest as well as Los Angeles street numbers. I am not looking forward to having to go by cross streets and looking up points of interest in a separate app (Acastus Photon).
if you don't already, contributing to OpenStreetMap from your phone is easy and feels very rewarding. I recommend StreetComplete for beginners and OSM Go! once you want to start editing features
I use duckduckgo for search, I have the DuckDuckGo privacy extensions installed in Chrome, along with EFF Privacy Badger. I'm not that worried about Google.
I did de-facebook myself. IMHO Facebook is far more invasive, far more harmful than Google.
There are plenty of YouTube alternatives if you’re looking to just host a video somewhere; but if you’re looking to grow an audience or have eclectic tastes, then there is not a reasonable alternative to YouTube yet. You can have every single other video service’s app on your iPad or Apple TV or bookmarked in your browsers and all of them combined will not match the selection and breadth and discoverability of YouTube. They’ve had some controversies and even personally annoyed me a few times, but YouTube is still one of the web’s jewels.
I switched from Gmail to using my own domain via ProtonMail. I persisted about 6 months with its terrible UX. Tried Mailfence next, same problem, lived with piss-poor UX for a few months before giving up. (I used Mailfence mainly with Apple Mail via IMAP, which was OK, but I frequently had to log in to their web interface to tweak settings etc, and it’s awful.)
Looked at a few others, but my need for a reasonable UX pushed me back to Gmail last year, this time with my own domain on G Suite (I figured paying a fee means I’m marginally better protected from account lockouts and other Google shenanigans, and at least I can take the domain with me when I leave). It’s so nice not to be constantly battling with email these days. But... in the back of my mind I do still want to get my email off Google. For privacy, control, and because I think getting off other Google services will be easier after that.
If I’m going to put the effort into switching again, I feel it might as well be to a somewhat privacy-focused email service (preferably not located in Australia or any jurisdiction that could force the company to break their own privacy guarantees without telling me). It doesn’t need to replicate Gmail’s feature set perfectly — I’m willing to put time into learning a whole different approach to email if necessary, but only if the UX/design is coherent and inspires confidence. Has anyone with similar requirements got any recommendations?
So the argument here seems to be: ‘I want to ditch google because of privacy concerns but, I will not compromise on usability’. Bad UI should not be that hard but google has many popular feature because they can analyse user data.
I hear the same argument with search and maps. Yes, DDG and Apple maps is not quite as good as Google’s. But, if you want privacy you will have to sacrifice something. Google has so many resources to put into their core product. Off course they will be better. And they use user data for some features which privacy focused companies just can’t provide. You just can’t have it all.
I’m not making any argument. I’m stating my personal needs and asking if anyone has any recommendations so I can move off Gmail.
Edit: I’m OK to sacrifice some UX quality btw, just not as much of a sacrifice as ProtonMail and Mailfence. And my love of Gmail’s UX has little to do with any creepy features that rely on data or fancy algorithms. It’s mostly stuff that any competitor could offer. Coherent design language across platforms, and generally well designed features that don’t compromise between flexibility and ease of use.
Any recommendations for email providers that support wildcard addresses (e.g. I can just give someone foobarbaz@y2bd.email without having manually set it up beforehand and it works)? I currently use ProtonMail which does support this, but PM is still lacking in terms of usability. I looked at some of the other well-known mail providers and was surprised to see that this wasn’t as supported as I’d expect (or, at least, they don’t prominently advertise this in their docs).
Fastmail supports regex and wildcards off the top of my head, as I have them set up with my own personal domain. My financial accounts for example are in the format of “bank+xxxxx@domain.tld”
Do you know if they’re required to use the +alias format? I’ve been burnt in the past by bad contact forms silently stripping out special characters out of email addresses.
It’s interesting to see this as #1 just now. It’s a little tangential, I’ve actually been doing a lot of researching on the recent changes to Search and fallout that users have reported + some further research into my own anecdotal change in experience of Search results for the better part of the day; plus it’s something I’ve been researching on and off since the beginning of 2020 when I noticed a significant change in the quality of search results I was getting (I.e. trying to search for web pages, published resources that I know are on the web and that I’ve located with Search, prior, and unfortunately, having a harder time with that. Plus there’s some other UI/UX changes in that time frame, too). That said, I have essentially come to the conclusion that I need to pivot away from Search and find/use one of the other search engines or risk further diminishing return within a number of research tasks. :(
Do you have examples for "trying to search for web pages, published resources that I know are on the web and that I’ve located with Search, prior, and unfortunately, having a harder time with that" ?
If anyone is struggling to replace specifically Google's search, may you check out SearX. It's FOSS, ability to self-host, no-logs, and does a wonderful job if you have set it up correctly.
My biggest usage is Chrome profiles. I use several for various personal and work accounts which means passwords, history, extensions, open sessions, and everything else are all nicely contained under separate Chrome windows.
Nothing else comes close to this kind of convenience and UX, and it's more secure since accounts are not co-mingled.
That sounds the same as Firefox profiles, plus Firefox has containers for more sectioning of data within a profile. Is there something Chrome has here that Firefox doesn’t?
Chrome profiles avoids having to create another (Firefox) account to manage the sync and data. Also Chrome has an easy menu for switching profiles and creates desktop/taskbar shortcuts for them. Firefox requires going to the about:profiles settings page to manage them. Also chrome profiles are integrated with G-Suite including security and organization settings.
Overall Chrome's version is just smoother and easier to use compared to Firefox. Mozilla should add better UI/menus and SSO for Firefox Accounts to get closer.
Containers are also extensible through add-ons. For example, the following two add-ons automatically isolate Facebook and Google into separate containers to reduce the impact of their tracking:
Firefox's two-tier approach (profiles and containers) to data isolation is much more flexible than Chrome's profiles. Containers handle many common use cases (e.g. logging on to the same site with multiple accounts simultaneously), and are very easy to use.
I don't want to mix usages in the same window though. The container features are nice, but they don't make up for the fact that Firefox profiles are still harder to use in general.
I wonder why more big corporations don't ban Google.
Through search alone, Google knows exactly what other big corporations are up to (perhaps even better than the corporations know themselves). That is something that should scare companies. I know GMail has been banned for this reason in a lot of places, but search is just as important.
Yep. I'd love to degoogle my personal stuff, but my work stuff has to be Google (I'm a teacher, and all our stuff is run through Google). Plus, my university alumni account is through Google, which would be annoying to change as that's how I've gotten in touch with a lot of useful contacts I've made.
In the process of doing the same
Gmail -> Kolabnow
Android -> Iphone (more expensive, but can last longer with reasonable user experience and I can resell for better prices)
Contacts and calendar -> Apple icloud
Google Maps -> apple maps (still have to use waze sometimes, traffic information works best in Waze in Brazil)
Search -> Duck Duck Go
Web -> Firefox (The multi account containers in Firefox is to good to stop using)
Google Drive -> Ondrive (I had to buy an Office 365 licence to my dad. End up buying the family licence, and 1 TB cloud storage endupd being very usefull). A shame I really dont use office, but, is there in the cloud if I ever need to open a word doc.
I still havent found a viable alternative to Youtube videos, but, I think is a matter of time for an alternative product reach enouth users)
The hardest service to part with is Google Analytics. Sure, there are some awesome and open source alternatives but you’re either paying a lot for them or you have to set up/maintain servers/VMs/VPS for the app, the databases, backups, etc.
For me, I think the biggest Google crutches I have left are: Translate and Voice. I run Havoc OS with microG, use Firefox, and everything else people suggest, but I can't shake these two.
Living in foreign countries it's obviously useful, and I would have been royally screwed in Vietnam without the offline translations when I crossed the border and no place was accepting my ATM card. Related usually to financial institutions, I don't keep an active US phone number and my Voice account is basically a 2FA front for places not using TOPT or FIDO2 for security or I couldn't access my cash or credit.
When I tried to change my gmail address of Firefox account, I realized it is not possible, because email address is the ID of the account.
Dear Mozilla folks, please let me change my email address of Firefox account.
One of the top entries in this article is a browser extension called minerBlock. It’s there to stop rogue websites using your browser’s JavaScript runtime for cryptocurrency mining.
I don’t know much about mining, but in the era of ASIC miners, how much dollar value does a minute or two of JS mining in Firefox get you? How many visitors do these rogue sites get?
It seems like a lot of effort to get a couple of cents for free, but I assume I’m hugely underestimating. I’m also still puzzled by why my partner’s MacBook was overheating last night, and wonder if I’ve just found out why.
I would be happy to pay Google a monthly fee for all their services. Mainly just so I feel like a customer instead of a product and to give me the peace of mind that if something goes wrong I can talk to a person that can help me.
At the moment I'm looking out for whatever service provider will let me have the equivalent of email, drive, calendar, docs and sheets all in one place.
Does anyone know of any that might have slipped under my radar?
Edit: anything comming up that is I can't see anything on the list that does everything. My best bet at the moment is proton will come up with something.
Ignoring reasons why I try to avoid Google, the following has worked well for me:
Mail - FastMail (spam detection not great but still works)
Search - StartPage (still google but proxied since DDG results are inferior in my experience)
Browser - Firefox (syncs to all my devices)
Maps - keyworded bookmark on Firefox to go to DDG maps powered by Apple Maps. Otherwise on phone it’s Apple Maps
Storage - Dropbox
Docs - local files synchronized to Dropbox
Last remaining service: YouTube. I’d love for the content providers I consume from to start posting on other platforms but that’s just not the case. For that, I use a google account for just YouTube.
dtube is an interesting alternative to youtube. It's a youtube clone built on ipfs. The only problem it doesn't have the same amount of content as youtube - nobody does.
To people using custom domains (for email, etc): what is your plan in-case you end up losing the domain name (either temporarily, or otherwise)? How do you prepare for this, reduce the risk, etc?
Losing your domain name can happen due to any number of reasons: hacked account (at the registrar), social engineering, etc. There can also be issues with registrars going bankrupt, increasing fees (see dot-org case), laws changing (especially with ccTLDs - see the dot-EU case with British citizens post-brexit) and much more...
Some of these alternatives, however, offer low content moderation compared to their corresponding Google products.
I see no disclaimer, for example, that bitchute is known for harboring conspiracy theories, often after they are banned from youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
It is worrying to see it presented as an "alternative" to youtube without this disclaimer.
I am not really married to google but I am not sure if it really pays the effort of moving my google account to a different provider.
I know that my data is used to make me an advertising target, I am going to get advertising anyway because we haven't found a better business models yet.
I don't use google search and chrome. But not sure if I will be able to switch to another email provider and will be able to spend the time and energy required to update my email everywhere.
The problem with de-googleifying is, to me, best summed up by Google+. When it was released, we were all extremely eager to leave Facebook’s abusive policies and needless redesigns for anything better. It was only one we discovered that Google+ really didn’t solve any issues at all that we moved back to Facebook.
Sure, Google steals your data. However, we have no guarantees that these new companies won’t steal just as much once they get a big userbase too.
My biggest problem cutting out Google from my life is with Maps.
Now, I can do just fine with OpenStreetMap (and such) as a physical or even a road map; but there are just so many venues and businesses that are listed on Google Maps... with their opening hours and links to websites.
Also, a lot of municipalities transfer public transport data to Google, which you can't quite get anywhere else (ignoring Google-reliant apps).
You can put the effort in on your schedule to degoogle, or wait for them to discontinue services where you have to degoogle on their priorities plans and schedule.
You'll note the list doesn't have solutions to replace Google Reader, or Google Music, or G+.
Someday I'm sure I'll have to replace Google Domains and Calendar and YouTube. Maybe I should do that on my schedule instead of waiting for google to decide for me.
For me the hardest part of avoiding Google is AMP, especially on mobile, where apps like Twitter redirect all links to their AMP equivalent by default.
Does anyone know a good way to avoid AMP reliably on mobile? What I currently do is pretty convoluted (see below).
On my iPhone, I use a DNS-based ad-blocker[2] and I just associate amp.* to 0.0.0.0 so most amp pages will fail. When the page fails to load, in the address bar I edit the URL manually and remove the "amp" portion, and finally I'm redirected to my news article.
Needless to say, sometimes this gets annoying so when I'm in a hurry I might disable this DNS rule temporarily.
On desktop, on the other hand, it's much easier because I use an extension that blocks AMP automatically[1]
[2] the app AdBlock for iPhone/iPad can import "PiHole compatible" lists (such as the ones at https://firebog.net/ ) and it does dns-level content blocking (in addition to that, it also works as a standard ad-blocker within Safari) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579
On twitter, im fairly sure AMP links are not hosted by Google. They use a standard developed and pushed by google but I believe the pages themselves are not served by them unless they are accessed from google search.
I dropped Google about a year ago, with two exceptions: (1) none of the YouTube replacements are even in the same ballpark (2) Google Translate still gives me the best results for the Thai language.
My big problem with Google is that they are evil and in denial - they want to slurp up all the data about everyone and monetize it, but they honestly don't get why that is bad.
Our company is degoogling by switching from angular to react, but of very profane causes: we don‘t trust them anymore based on their sunsetting history. Maybe that‘ll be the driving force.
We’re a (by far) market leading B2C & B2B company in a “non-shithole” G7 country.
Yes, Facebook is not a real improvement, but at least they eat their own dog food!
Still no replacement for Google Voice. That’s my one indispensible service. Having a single phone number not connected to my carrier that a) can ring all my numbers and b) transcribe voice mail is incredibly convenient. I would pay a monthly fee for that service and do it gladly. But nobody offers it.
Why not take this the way we should, as consumers:
Cut all big cos out. The Internet already gives us tools to run everything as a community, yet we are not doing that.
We can fund open source software/hardware, crowdsource their continued development. It takes leadership, like the big cos have. But we can get it done.
For those into self-hosting, there's some really up and coming options these days - Cloudron, Yunohost, homelabos. Sandstorm also seems some activity again these days (come on guys!). Honestly, it really is not that hard to degoogle these days especially if you are a techie.
I've got almost 12TB stored in my Google Drive so that alone makes it basically impossible to switch. There's no other provider I'd trust with that much data for the price (G Suite). As much as I'd love to switch, it's just not worth the headache IMO.
Other than the Google web search (which I don't always use; sometimes I use other web search engines, and often I don't need any web search at all), the other Google product I use is V8 (although not Chrome or Chromium, I do use V8).
For those who want to cut Google but still have to use AdWords (you advertise your product), AdSense/AdMob (you earn from ads), Play (you publish Android apps), and Contacts (integrated with your Android phone) -- what's your setup?
What’s a strong alternative for admin.google.com? Most importantly, making an org with a custom domain and managing users with email addresses on that domain.
Yet—as soon as they do, I'll probably jump to them. I'm using Zoho right now. That's the nice thing about having your email address at your own domain—I can move freely from provider to provider while using the same address!
It's interesting to see how Google turned from a respected company everyone wanted to work at to a "persona non grata" within just a few years. I wonder what were the main reasons for this change?
Perhaps heavy negative campaigning previously by Microsoft (Scroogled?) and still by Murdoch's media outlets had at least some effects.
Their fail fast, watch growth metics and bad product leadership also don't help
I think public opinion on data collection and targeted advertising has really changed in the past couple decades. No one really thought or cared about it when Google was founded, whereas now it's devolved into mass hysteria.
I am old so I have worked for various big and small tech companies, including most of the ones being discussed here.
Google is the one I would trust with my data.
They know how to do hosting at scale (unlike some really quite large and famous companies who suck at that), although not perfect, they have a humanist moral compass in their culture, and I don't expect them to go out of business.
I would not make myself reliant on a niche Google product (like Google Reader) as those tend to vanish, but a mainstream Google service like GMail or YouTube is a great reliable thing. If you think other companies are more moral than Google, you are fooling yourself.
I don't think it's easy to change that. Must be interesting to experiment in the countries where Tech options are available, in some countries, Google is the only thing known.
More education is needed to implement something like this.
I use Google's products daily and agree they are often better than the competition. But do you not at least see the potential for a problem when gigantic semi-monopolistic tech companies control major parts of the societal methods for discourse and discovery, while collecting personal data from almost everyone? Are people who worry about this so unreasonable that they are deserving of flippant insults and name-calling?
> What's next? No more StackOverflow? No more using that popular package manager and, instead, installing all that stuff manually?
You give no convincing reason why that would be a probable next step, if you even believe it yourself. You buried your own point beneath so many layers of sarcasm that it is neither humorous nor insightful.
> But do you not at least see the potential for a problem when gigantic semi-monopolistic tech companies control major parts of the societal methods for discourse and discovery, while collecting personal data from almost everyone...
Sure, that's called Facebook, and yet it's still around.
This is a textbook false dichotomy. You're basically saying there are two choices 1) use whatever is convenient with absolutely no regard for privacy or 2) don't use computers at all and put on a tinfoil hat.
> Where do you draw the line?
Clearly they've drawn it to exclude Google, what's the problem with that?
There's obviously no inherent problem, but their reasoning is all theoretical and there's no reason not to expand it further based on their own logic. If you don't trust Google, why would you trust any of the other major players online like AWS, Azure, Cloudflare etc? Without those the internet basically doesn't work and you'd be better off not even bothering, thus meaning option 2 is the end result of the privacy minded.
> and there's no reason not to expand it further based on their own logic
And this is a textbook slippery slope argument. Also the clear difference between Google and the examples you've provided is the revenue model. The primary way Google makes money is selling user data to advertisers. next to social media sites, they're the most obvious targets for privacy-minded people.
It makes me so happy to see people standing up for what they believe in. I don't agree with the author's views on Google but I do agree with his personal stance of willing to be inconvenienced because of his views on Google.
I observe that most people are willing to hold an opinion until they are inconvenienced. Society would be better if citizens backed their values with their actions. Convenience is not a value.
People switching away from Gmail aren't switching away from IMAP.
People giving up Google Search aren't leaving HTTPS.
You draw the line at open protocols.
Maybe StackOverflow should be decentralized and community governed. Maybe we should be demanding more open hardware. Maybe we do need to re-evaluate who's maintaining our packages and make sure their interests are aligned with community interests. We can vote with our attention and money and what software we choose to run.
Personally, do what you're comfortable with, but you shouldn't mock others for trying to make privacy possible. You never know, some day you might need it.
If you love Google then you're not the target audience for this. It's for people who ~~acknowledge the obvious fact that~~ believe Google is evil and want to minimize their interaction with the company.
The internet world has been overrun by marketing people. But know that all marketing is a subset of the work by Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, and creator of Propaganda/ Public Relations. I'm not a fan of it.
Personally, I feel there's a lot to dislike about in the modern world. The 'advances' in technology also come with an increased speed at which things are done. I presume many, if not most would use the word "efficiency" to describe it.
But in the days before wireless phones, you would arrange places and times, and it would or wouldn't happen to the schedule, and you had to accept it.
So, although you label the people looking elsewhere a snowflake (made me laugh btw), I find the opposite is actually happening. Because people aren't being forced to learn the lesson of acceptance and that things are out of their control, we've created a binary world figuratively and literally where woke arguments clash with others at the speed of light. Everyday I discover there another group of people hating another... And use tech to do it: publically.
So, instead I see this push to decouple from goog, as desire for more autonomy and control in one's life. Everything these days is right at our fingertips, and goog was the first to bring this to us. Ironically, I see the snowflakes as those in this hyper connected world, where outrage exists under every tech interaction, because they've never had to learn acceptance. I find myself aligning myself with farmers, because they have to deal with acceptance a lot: from fixing machines in the middle of a field to burying animals. Everything is hard for a farmer, and tech solutions ultimately break at an inconvenient time.
If it weren't for people depending on me to provide some modicum of alternate communication and interaction using tech, I'd have left all it long ago. (But I accept this)
My friends have heard me talking of the desire for two tin cans and a piece of string. I think it's the way to go.
So, the short answer for me is no vpn, no goog, no ddg, no fastmail is better. Self host, only. I don't care for twits or public selfies.
My what an excellent bubble you’ve built for yourself. No wonder you like Google. I bet your panties got in quite a wad reading about people who don’t like the things you do.
I use Google products heavily, especially Android, Maps and Gmail, but I have switched to using DuckDuckGo as my primary search provider. Have been using it as my default for over a year now and it feels like Google used to, before all the annoying personalised results and tinkering started ruining their search.
I agree, although sometimes it works. The same is true of other search engines, although they are sometimes better, sometimes worse, than Google. (But often I don't need web search that much anyways. I have man pages, Wikipedia, books, etc.)
It's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid Google with the upcoming Fuchsia OS designed to work everywhere and replace Android and also Google's upcoming SoC.
I will keep using Google products for as long as they keep being great.
Life's too short for extreme measures. You gotta pick your fights.
What I did stop using was anything Apple related and that fight was easy to pick. Their repair-hostile-by-design hardware actually harm the environment. Plus it proved trivial to replace their crap with superior tech.
Whether their products are good or not is beside the point.
They do everything they can to have your PII and this is something people should care about.
Things like 'accidentally' collecting your BSSIDs for Google Maps or providing Google Fonts not because they want a more beautiful Web, but to have a tracker on your site.
None of that affects me negatively, they can have all my info for all I care.
Plus they make our lives easier on a level that was unthinkable not long ago with Best in Slot free products like youtube, maps, search, email, open source browser and accessible smartphones with open source OS.
My only complain to Alphabet is that they like to toy with us by keeping Mozilla alive on a feeding tube. That's just cruel, I expected some mercy.
And for a good reason. I could, for example, take a quick glance at your profile and see that you spread misinformation about VS Code 7 hours ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251487) but what good would it bring? I'd rather argue about the topic at hand.
--------------------------------
Now resuming the discussion about using Google services anyway because life's too short to bother:
That's just how 7 billion people think.
Out of bubbles, there's much more to worry about on a daily basis than what some web site knows about me.
Our privilege blinds us and Maslow's Pyramid gets all sorts of messed up around these parts just because we can.
I think the mistake Google is making is not charging high prices a la. Apple for their products. It'd result in a big drop in user base initially but over time people will respect it more and stop writing up articles on how to stop using a free ad supported product in favor of a set of random toy projects
The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail).
Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is.
On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one).
One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc.
I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too).
The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube.
Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose.
They better hope their ad revenue doesn’t decay.