Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 665 posts

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#431

Post by bad_user »

millimeterman wrote: post #309
bb88 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

No, Facebook shouldn't have collected the data in the first place, because leaks are inevitable.

It's not Facebook's incompetence to blame, no matter how much you try spinning it that way.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#432

Post by gonehome »

ekianjo wrote: post #398
gonehome wrote: post #17

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…

> On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. Interesting, how do they such sites deal with people who lose their email account (phishing or others?)

They tell you to just make a new account with a new email.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#433

Post by sildur »

StreamBright wrote: post #430
M0r13n wrote: post #427

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, independe…

>> 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.

It’s been ages since I used GMail web interface. It feels slow and cluttered. I prefer a local email client.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#434

Post by Qwertious »

jrnichols wrote: post #248
mianos wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 whatev…

Google sounds like Microsoft 20 years ago, but perhaps without falling into Microsoft's specific mistake of shoddy software.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#435

Post by maxekman »

switch11 wrote: post #352
gonehome wrote: post #17

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…

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this 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 amoun…

> Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google

Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#436

Post by hackstack »

submeta wrote: post #83
Scarbutt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't firefox been defunded and likely to no have a future?

If that was the case I‘d fall back to Safari. Even though my browsing experience wouldn’t be the same anymore (using a dozen addons in Firefox).

I believe the upcoming version of Safari will have WebExtension support, so at least there's that.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#438

Post by Qwertious »

granzymes wrote: post #224
pydry wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ele…

Or they go after the people who have tried to hide themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think this is a very odd thing to structure a life around, but then again I've never understood any kind of doomsday prepping.

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.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#439

Post by M0r13n »

StreamBright wrote: post #430
M0r13n wrote: post #427

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, independe…

>> 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.
Post reply on HN