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What I Use Instead of Google

kiramclean.com

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Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#61

Post by throwaway9d0291 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things. Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. F…

> Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it.

At the very least, if you use providers other than Google, you can decentralize it. You can give one company your search history and a different company your emails. Even if both companies are equal to Google in terms of privacy, you still end up with better overall privacy because tehy can't join the two datasets.

> ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general).

Can you back that up with some references? I live in Switzerland and Swiss data protection law is certainly better than American.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#62

Post by dusted »

I'm all for getting out of the cloud, but moving from one company, to multiple other companies seems to have achieved nothing but diversify and multiply the amount of terms you've had to agree to (they will all tell you the same thing in the end: if they block your account, or lose your data, it's your problem).

The only real solution is self-hosting[1], which is becoming a bit difficult with email these days.

[1] No, a rented server in some datacenter is not self-hosting, self-hosting is when you can walk into a room and point to the box that stores your mail.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#63

Post by ajnin »

systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things. Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. F…

How much do you value your online life ? Put all your eggs in one basket and you allow yourself to be locked away from it at the whim of some unknown algorithm, with practically no recourse. A strike on your account (maybe a Play Store upload or some vague TOS violation) and you may be locked out of your mail and the auth that you use for everything. You'll end up adapting your behavior, consciously or not, to avoid angering the giant. Spreading the risks, and taking back control, seems the level-headed thing to do.

And the concept that there is only a single company in the world that knows a thing about security seems deluded to me.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#64

Post by bserge »

eating555 wrote: post #17

I've checked Linode. Why it's price is much lower than others like AWS, Azure or GCP? Because of some drawback?

It's the other way around, AWS/etc are more expensive. Linode is just a VPS provider, and it's been great for me for the past 6 years. There are cheaper alternatives, though.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#65

Post by cageface »

oarsinsync wrote: post #34
JAlexoid wrote: post #2

Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face. OSM would be a better solution. If only an email service as good as Gmail existed anywhere on this planet :(

> Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face. After doing some basic A/B testing (checking Google Maps, Waze and Apple Maps for routing guidance) and establishing that Apple Maps has been giving me earlier arrival times through different routing guidance (and actually delivering on that earlier arrival time, by means of actually using it), I've determined that's less likely to be true, if you're…

We techies like to believe that we can find technical solutions to these problems but I think this is misguided. Even for a very technical user completely untangling yourself from FAANG is a lot of work and a massive inconvenience. And if this kind of privacy is really only available to a small technical elite then how much good is it anyway? Privacy is only really valuable when it's accessible to everyone.

Respect for user privacy is going to have to come from regulation.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#67

Post by robenkleene »

systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things. Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. F…

This comment should not be this highly rated on Hacker News. The entire content of this comment is: I read a bunch of stuff somewhere that said all these alternative companies are bad.

There are no links to sources, there's no evidence presented, there's nothing to dispute. There's no substance to this comment.

Hacker News has a bias towards Google because Google offers a bunch of services for free that are useful to HN's audience, so HN users would rather not have reasons not to use Google services, which is why comments like this get upvoted, despite their lack of substance.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#68

Post by wtmt_arn »

throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #61
systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things. Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. F…

> Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. At the very least, if you use providers other than Google, you can decentralize it. You can give one company your search history and a different company your emails. Even if both companies are equal to Google in terms of privacy, you still end up with better overall privacy because tehy can't join the two datasets. > Prot…

Crypto AG, Omnisec AG, etc. It seems to be common pattern for spy agencies to "whitewash" their operations via a swiss company, making them look neutral and wholesome and trustworthy...

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/second-swiss-firm-allegedly-sol...

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#69

Post by vinni2 »

bdefore wrote: post #24
vinni2 wrote: post #21

Every time I try to get out of google they (my colleagues) pull me back in. They share documents in google docs and google drive. I have no choice but to keep my google account.

Would they accept you using a work-related Google account?

They don’t mind which gmail account I use. I work at a university so we don’t have gsuite. I guess it’s a good idea to use a separate account for this but I don’t want to create yet another google account.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#70

Post by junon »

systemvoltage wrote: post #30

Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things. Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. F…

This is the most deluded and blatantly incorrect comment I've seen on HackerNews to date.
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