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Alternatives to Google Products

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461–470 of 527 posts

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#461
post #435
post #418

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Do you have any book recommendations?

Dune's CHOAM corporation is a great example. Ownership in choam is synonyms with power and wealth. All political maneuvering is based on gaining or keeping control in choam corporation.

For "receiving end" perspectives, watch Blade Runner (the old one) or Altered Carbon. The Expanse probbly qualifies too. For books, Peter Hamilton incorporates different mega-corps in his universe but it's not the main object. Special mention to the Void Trilogy's Commonwealth.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that really only helps for local binaries.

Even then, it might work well for you, and if I had the patience or the time it could work well for me, but it'll never be of any use to my mum or my brother, neither of whom are technical.

I suppose it depends on how it ends up being implemented. I was envisioning something fairly automated, which could presumably spit out PACKAGE VERIFIED information that could be used in systems not requiring users to be technical.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#463
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, though that would require me to sign in. Does that actually prevent the data from being stored on Google's servers? I'd like to believe that the data isn't being vacuumed up regardless of what the user says, so if you're willing to vouch for it then that would mean a lot.

How can you ever trust anyone like that ? Unless, you see the line of code that is deleting the data ?. It's kind of unfair when people on HN take Apple by their word and for Google "oh is it really deleted though" ?

If a current employee is willing to vouch for it, that carries some weight. It's a useful data point.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#464
post #461
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dune's CHOAM corporation is a great example. Ownership in choam is synonyms with power and wealth. All political maneuvering is based on gaining or keeping control in choam corporation.

For "receiving end" perspectives, watch Blade Runner (the old one) or Altered Carbon. The Expanse probbly qualifies too. For books, Peter Hamilton incorporates different mega-corps in his universe but it's not the main object. Special mention to the Void Trilogy's Commonwealth.

The Expanse's high-political scene is best described by the balance of powerful sovereigns, and how that changes over time. Companies have a lot of power, but that power is primarily expressed by influence in governments. A company gets mining rights from a U.N. charter by influence. Then the company expects the U.N. military to defend those mining rights. Sometimes the company influences the goverment and sometimes the goverment influences the company. The big exception to this is the O.P.A. which always tends centralize power around Tycho.

Altered Carbon also uses goverment as the primary seat of power. United Nations Envoy Corps are primarily a reskinning of Dune's Sardaukar, the powerful super soldiers that enforce the rule of law out of fear. There are very powerful corporations, especially those discussed in the first book, but their power is again through the influence of government, and goverment has the authority to act independently.

This is in comparison to a true mega-corp like Final Fantasy 7's Shinra Corporation, where all power exists within the company. Shinra can destroy 1/8th of the capitol city with no repercussions, and there is no significant economic activity outside of the company.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#465
post #301

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I’m doing this in the coming days — setting my custom domain with Fastmail. I’m planning on making that my main email and trying my best to unsubscribe from things on my Gmail account and move accounts over from Gmail to Fastmail until I think for certain I could delete my Google account entirely with no harm. Then again, I rarely have and like having subscriptions these days because of minimalism but I suppose this…

I generally don't trust GoDaddy, but I don't see how they could violate your privacy. From what I can tell, the worst they could do would be to log DNS queries. If you have a server with a static IP, you can always serve DNS yourself.

Out of curiosity, what domain registar do you use? With GoDaddy, I pay $14.99/yearly for .COM Domain Renewal and $9.99/yearly for Private Domain Registration Renewal. It seems a bit price-y but I'm completely unaware of other competitor's prices.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#466

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I know it's not exactly your point, but Etar is pretty nice, and apparently is cross-platform (Android & iOS - which I didn't know), and exists on F-Droid ( https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/ ), Google Play (it seems somehow wrong to link to the Google Play Store given the context, but it's easy to find there anyway), and Apple's App Store ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8 ). I think…

There is a fork of maps.me on f-droid that strips out analytics/ads/proprietary bits. It's called omim ( https://gitlab.com/axet/omim ).

On F-Droid it's just called Maps though: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#467
post #379

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Is that option enabled in default installation of firefox? Sorry, I must have specified that in Safari ITP is enabled by default, and this is important for non-tech people.

No. It hasn't been enabled by default in my experience. It isn't the exact same as the Safari technology. Firefox lets you block "3rd party cookies" or "all cookies" from the privacy pane of preferences. I've always "set it and forget it". The assumption is that many tracking cookies will come from 3rd party websites.

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Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#468
post #339

> All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market. Google has what I think are the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing his…

The unavoidable suggested answers in gmail make my skin crawl. I dont want it and i dont want to be reminded that you can read my emails despite my consent for it I guess it's a good reminder that i need to change services

How can an email service work without "reading" your email? Emails need to be indexed to be searcheable etc.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#469
post #324

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I'm ignorant, I suppose, because you are unwilling or unable to list a single tangible potential harm. Home invasion? Please explain how Google tracking me is going to help a home invader. Or are you talking about me posting stuff on Facebook? Because that's a very, very different thing.

My goal when commenting is to counterbalance overly pro-surveilance comments, not become somebody's privacy coach and patiently explain to them all the bad things that could happen. That takes a lot of effort and offers me zero benefit - even in real life, people that I've known for years can be stubborn and they dig in when confronted with arguments. I'm more concerned about the effects of mass corporate surveilance…

My question was regarding the individual, not society in general. I'm not so convinced the use of Google services and the way they get revenue is such a problem for society either, but that wasn't my question. I am interested in knowing whether using these alternatives instead of Google is in my self interest, when all things are taken into account and rationally balanced. I have yet to hear a convincing argument that they are.

You don't have to explain all the bad things that happen if you don't want to, but it sure seems like you are avoiding the question.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#470
post #145

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Neither. It's an option in the preferences.

Is that option enabled in default installation of firefox? Sorry, I must have specified that in Safari ITP is enabled by default, and this is important for non-tech people.

The default is 'allow everything'

You can change a setting to block third party cookies. This gets you similar treatment of cookies as was the default in safari 1-10.

Safari 11 still blocks third party cookies by default, but has 'Intelligent Tracking Protection' as an additional filter on top of it. ITP blocks/limits certain uses of first-party cookies.

Firefox has no analogous option. Either cookies are off, or all uses of first party cookies are allowed.

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