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What I use instead of Google services

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: What I use instead of Google services

#201

Post by joeclark77 »

imgabe wrote: post #180
joeclark77 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But somebody who wants to burglarize your house, or worse, could figure out when you're likely not to be home.

This supposes that burglars work by picking out a person, then waiting until they're not home to go rob their house. Instead, burglars search through a neighborhood to find houses where nobody is home, then break in and steal things. It's the other way around. Regardless, if you're an average adult in the US, "weekdays between 9 and 5" is a fairly reasonable assumption of when you won't be home. No giant database nee…

I didn't want to expand on what I meant by "or worse", but let's imagine you have a teenage daughter...

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#202

Post by joeclark77 »

ewoodrich wrote: post #196
joeclark77 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true of doctors with coffee bars, but it is absolutely NOT true of Google. Google is an advertising company, period. All of the thousand things they do are for one purpose: to sell advertising based on getting better and better at knowing the customer and targeting ads you're likely to click on. Even if Google does say that some app is firewalled, the implied follow up is "...until customers stop caring"…

This goes both ways -- the sheer amount of personal data that is entrusted to Google requires that they maintain a basic level of trust with their users. If they were to flip a switch and turn Gmail-mined data into a dating site, or something, users would leave en masse. And good luck trying to entice new users with an expectation that their information would be misused.

They won't "flip a switch", they'll just wait until the relentless march of time lowers users' expectations.

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#203

Post by throwaway7808 »

jusben1369 wrote: post #199
brave-new wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in the information age and information now is the ultimate power. Many people don't believe it, the same way that before the Civil and Crimean Wars not everybody believed that industry is the ultimate power of the industrial age. By letting Google collect enormous amounts of data about you, you are letting them have power over you. It can be used for pushing you to buy stuff against your rational will or for…

One can't live ones live today driven by an assumption that they'll be ruled by a totalitarian government in the future. Your mind is already trapped; you're effectively living in fear today that one day in the future you'll be living in fear.

Most likely you and your kids are gonna be wiped out by intellegent machines just in a few decades.

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#204

Post by cik »

privong wrote: post #113
cik wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

owncloud has two-factor support via Google Authenticator, I'm happy enough there. I use Authy to sync the tokens between my devices. Full caveat though: I never have a single device with both my tokens, and synced password database - just in case memory dumps of phones/tablets become valid. So, I dump my password database to my tablet, whereas I sync my authy tokens between two phones.

What owncloud plugin, I mean. I have not been able to locate 2FA in the OC config, and my searching for plugins has had mixed results.

Sorry, that was daft of me. I'm using One Time Password Backend (http://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/One+Time+Password+...), but again, with OC6... until tonight.

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#205

Post by marrone12 »

nickonline wrote: post #189
dirtyaura wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Of 12-14 services he listed, 4 were from Apple (iOS, Mobile Safari, Apple Maps for directions, and iCloud for Calendar sync). And quite likely, he is not paranoidily avoiding Google, but partly experimenting as he is running one of the very few companies that are directly trying to compete with Google in search.

Just going from your examples above: - Safari/iOS will let Apple know you're in a market for a house - Safari will let Apple know you like Ethiopain coffee - Also it will probably allow them to track your searches - Along with Calendar sync and maps Apple knows both where you are currently and where you'll be next While not all of his eggs are in one basket, there's an awful lot of them providing an awful lot of "tra…

The only difference is that Apple is not an advertising company. Google explicitly uses your information to advertise against you. Apple is not yet in that vertical.

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#206

Post by TD-Linux »

elliottpayne wrote: post #40

I switched to fastmail and duckduckgo in lieu of google products a little over a year ago for some of the same reasons. I tried to switch to safari from chrome, and that experiment lasted about 3 months before I got annoyed by how safari handles multiple tabs. But, as far as most of the criticisms posted here, they're really unfounded. If you want to be a purist about privacy, you really have to just quit using techn…

I'm not sure if switching to Safari is a huge jump ahead, because both are closed source software. You could switch to Chromium and get Chrome without the tracking, or use Firefox instead.

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#207

Post by X-Istence »

dskhatri wrote: post #99
astrocat wrote: post #75

> "Like most people, I don't like to be tracked. I also am the founder of the search engine that doesn't track you, DuckDuckGo." It pains me to hear intelligent people talk about being "tracked" as something "bad" a priori. While there are certainly plenty of examples of abuse of knowledge, I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building." Let me explain... Google is a service provi…

His point is more about not putting all your eggs in one basket; you certainly don't tell your barista about an upcoming physician's appointment, or that you are in the market for a house. Your barista is also disconnected from parties who may leverage the information you provide him/her. Similarly, you don't tell your broker that you prefer Ethiopian coffee. Google offers so many services that it has a much broader…

Actually, I do tell my broker I like Ethiopian coffee, if I like it, there are probably many more like me, find me some shares in a company that deals in Ethiopian coffee!

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#208

Post by jessedhillon »

marrone12 wrote: post #205
nickonline wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just going from your examples above: - Safari/iOS will let Apple know you're in a market for a house - Safari will let Apple know you like Ethiopain coffee - Also it will probably allow them to track your searches - Along with Calendar sync and maps Apple knows both where you are currently and where you'll be next While not all of his eggs are in one basket, there's an awful lot of them providing an awful lot of "tra…

The only difference is that Apple is not an advertising company. Google explicitly uses your information to advertise against you. Apple is not yet in that vertical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

iAd is a mobile advertising platform developed by Apple Inc. for its iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad line of mobile devices allowing third-party developers to directly embed advertisements into their applications. Announced on April 8, 2010, iAd is part of Apple's iOS 4, originally slated for release on June 21, 2010, the actual date was changed to July 1, 2010.

Re: What I use instead of Google services

#209

Post by BallinBige »

kllrnohj wrote: post #111
dskhatri wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point is more about not putting all your eggs in one basket; you certainly don't tell your barista about an upcoming physician's appointment, or that you are in the market for a house. Your barista is also disconnected from parties who may leverage the information you provide him/her. Similarly, you don't tell your broker that you prefer Ethiopian coffee. Google offers so many services that it has a much broader…

Except the author then proceeds to toss all his eggs into Apple's basket. No, it's not about putting all the eggs in one basket, it's about paranoidly avoiding Google at all costs for some unknown reason.

He's pretty biased. A healthy biased in his vested interests :]
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