I tried. I failed. I returned. Google is like Gravity. It would be awesome to escape it, but it’s expensive, impractical, and sooner or later, you will be back where you where. :(
Where have you failed? What services are like drugs to you? ;)
Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
211–220 of 665 posts
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#212Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…
See some of the stories here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365
People have been locked out of their Google accounts with no explanation and no recourse.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#213It's becoming increasingly difficult to avoid Google with the upcoming Fuchsia OS designed to work everywhere and replace Android and also Google's upcoming SoC.
I will never, ever install Fuchsia if I can help it. Replacing one Google Spyware OS with another doesn't solve anything.
I will keep using Google products for as long as they keep being great.
Life's too short for extreme measures. You gotta pick your fights.
What I did stop using was anything Apple related and that fight was easy to pick. Their repair-hostile-by-design hardware actually harm the environment. Plus it proved trivial to replace their crap with superior tech.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#214Any recommendations for email providers that support wildcard addresses (e.g. I can just give someone foobarbaz@y2bd.email without having manually set it up beforehand and it works)? I currently use ProtonMail which does support this, but PM is still lacking in terms of usability. I looked at some of the other well-known mail providers and was surprised to see that this wasn’t as supported as I’d expect (or, at least, they don’t prominently advertise this in their docs).
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#215Does a service being part of the “5-eyes” really mean anything? I mean, this list makes it sound like being in China is a better alternative than being in Canada.
No, it doesn’t. There was a time period where people were trying to use/put services in Iceland or Switzerland because they weren’t part of a known default sharing arrangement and people completely relied on poor interpretations of laws acting like the government took a completely hands off approach to data. The reality is that absent a treaty, these places can all choose respond to foreign warrants and often times d…
> The reality is that absent a treaty, these places can all choose respond to foreign warrants and often times do.
The question shouldn't be if they "can" the question should be if they "can be forced to and be legally required not to disclose it".
There is a reason American companies have tried to hack around the law with warrant canaries.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)
My first impulse was to move away from everything google. I don‘t know much about any wrong-doings of Dropbox. Maybe I need to do some research.
This did it for me: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/
But if it hadn't, then probably this: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/...
Dropbox was such a great and conceptually simple tool, having a kernel extension for smarter syncing feels like a step into Enterprise lala land.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also use iCloud for all my iDevices. It‘s not fast or as flexible as Dropbox but privacy wise I prefer them over any other cloud sync solution.
iCloud is the only one with servers in China, so it is objectively the worst privacy-wise.
You misunderstand the situation. Chinese users, in China, connect to iCloud servers in China.
They are not used for anyone outside China.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
>People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. The threat model I work off is "fascist government seizes power in the United States and sequesters all data for all citizens from the top 15 large corporations". Then they get to work weeding out undesirables. This would happen, I'd estimate, in the space of about a month although if…
Sure, but if that happens... I think we're fucked either way? I think any providers would be just as susceptible (maybe more so; Google ostensibly has the means to protect data, legally and technologically), and your data would already be on Google's servers unless you only emailed or chatted with other non-Google users.
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 elevated "risk" score because of some stray data point (e.g. some people you emailed once, or some guy's house you visited) is minimized.
They're not going to keep track of everybody personally, but they will be running machine learning models all up and down every data point you left to pick out anything suspicious.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#219It's interesting to see how Google turned from a respected company everyone wanted to work at to a "persona non grata" within just a few years. I wonder what were the main reasons for this change?
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#220Any recommendations for email providers that support wildcard addresses (e.g. I can just give someone foobarbaz@y2bd.email without having manually set it up beforehand and it works)? I currently use ProtonMail which does support this, but PM is still lacking in terms of usability. I looked at some of the other well-known mail providers and was surprised to see that this wasn’t as supported as I’d expect (or, at least…
Fastmail supports regex and wildcards off the top of my head, as I have them set up with my own personal domain. My financial accounts for example are in the format of “bank+xxxxx@domain.tld”