What are the best alternative email services with a privacy focus?
Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
241–250 of 296 posts
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#242The marketers and advertisers have finally won. Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe, but this confirms it. It's like Facebook, they're beholden to the non-developers and non-software engineers who frankly don't care about other people's privacy and only see the dollar bills. So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.
It is not engineering vs advertising. Developers are not some kind of perfectly pure and moral people, and engineering is not an end in itself, it's always to serve some other purpose. There is no such thing as a tech/engineering company.
"Don't be evil" ... ?
It's not about developers being perfectly pure and moral, it's about an organisation holding themselves up to a standard that they have set themselves.
And a standard which I expect them to meet and exceed.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have similiar issues with games. I dread open ended ones - Witcher, Skyrim - because of the prospect of them never ending. But it's worse than that because the least resistance in gameplay and I will abandon the game. For instance, I've haven't been able to play more than 10 minutes of Cities: Skylines because it gets overwhelming. At least now I accept that I don't have to finish games. That it's ok to even uninst…
Please consider Board Games as an alternative to Computer Games. There has never been a better time to get into the hobby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKgz-UBEhss :)
Seconding this. There are boardgames that are simple enough for small children, but are still interesting enough for adults. You can find casual games that you can play in five minutes while waiting for the bus, or you can find a game that'll occupy your family for an entire extended weekend.
And if we're including things like D&D and Pathfinder, that's easily months of entertainment.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not engineering vs advertising. Developers are not some kind of perfectly pure and moral people, and engineering is not an end in itself, it's always to serve some other purpose. There is no such thing as a tech/engineering company.
"Don't be evil" ... ? It's not about developers being perfectly pure and moral, it's about an organisation holding themselves up to a standard that they have set themselves. And a standard which I expect them to meet and exceed.
> And a standard which I expect them to meet and exceed
Then you're a fool. If you want to slam people for not meeting standards, they'll have to be objectively defined. There's no sense of "evil" you could ever hope for people to agree on.
Your complaint is similar to the chorus of people complaining that they voted for "hope" and Obama let them down. They should have known that would happen when they saw that his slogan was "hope".
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thought this was satire, but then I saw your other comment. Good on you two.
I'll be honest, I wrote all this out and read it to my wife before posting, and we both laughed at how crazy it sounds. It's the aggregate of lots of little decisions in the past year and we're not solid on any of it yet. We'll be using tech for a lot of things still, we'll have a server with our personal images, and I'm looking at some Arduino stuff for home automation things. I don't think tech is bad, just a lot o…
Until you open up incognito windows to get around the noprocrast. ;) It's still a good hurdle and a tiny reminder even when I bypass it, though.
> I don't think tech is bad, just a lot of it is designed as a feedback loop of addiction.
Totally agree with this. I turn off all most notifications on my phone and tell people that if they really want to reach me, a phone call or SMS is still the best. I've also been calling people more because generally we can arrive at solutions in a minute of talking instead of 10 minutes of half-minded replies.
Sometimes I feel like the best balance of technology/attention was around the early 2000s when things weren't totally vying for our attention. When there was a clear distinction being being online and offline. When you would type "afk", then go do other stuff uninterrupted.
Of course it's easy to romanticize as that's also the era when I personally started surfing the information superhighway.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't really bother me if the internet knows that I recently bought a nice soldering iron on Amazon or that I play D&D with my friends. I kinda view the internet as public and I don't really have huge privacy concerns about information I put in public.
Other people have legitimate concerns about others knowing what they bought on Amazon or do with their friends. In some jurisdictions, buying what seem like normal products to you and I is illegal. Some people live in areas where others knowing they are gay, transgendered, conservative, atheist, etc. will get them fired or literally killed. It's great that you don't have to worry about that. But others do, and it's g…
Yeah. One of the promising things about the internet, very early on, is that it gave people communities that they couldn't have in the real world because they lived in areas hostile to gays, or trans people, or... It's hard not to wonder if we're going backwards sometimes.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you forgotten the years they went providing Google search without a single ad?
So then would you say Google was a search company and is now an ad company?
It's still a search company. What search engine do you use? Who has built a better web search product than Google? I admire DuckDuckGo and am hopeful for them in the future, but Google is simply still the best search engine out there.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#248What are the best alternative email services with a privacy focus?
Maybe not the answer you were looking for, but self-hosting email can be a fun challenge.
Lavabit had a privacy focus and look what happened to them.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you forgotten the years they went providing Google search without a single ad?
Which years were those? Google has been putting ads in search results since at least 2000. Are you talking about 1998-2000?
Yes. Those are years, plural, when Google the company was not putting advertisements into search results. They may have always monetization via ads when they decided to turn it into a company (Larry and Sergei did not think about ads when they were developing the initial product, but I'll concede that they likely just hadn't ever considered that they'd be able to turn a research product into a company at all), but they inarguably built the product before selling one single advertisement.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not easy to find good alternatives if you require that your email be free. If you're willing to pay for email (and really, if email is important to you, you should be paying for it) there's a number of excellent providers. I recommend FastMail, but I've seen people talk about a few other good ones too (though I forget the names).
I, for one, am an enthusiastic paying customer of Fastmail.
Seconded.