221–230 of 665 posts
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…
Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…
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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.
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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 ele…
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.
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No, we care when those companies are giant multinational monopolies. Think of it this way. I walk into a mom & pop clothing store, and one of the sales people on the floor takes note into a little pad the items of clothing I touched, so that they might optimise their purchasing. Contrast that to one person from one of the worlds largest companies, following me at home, work, the shops, the pub, the bedroom, tallying…
In either case I still bought my slacks from the clothing store, my pint from the tavern, and slept soundly in my bed. You object to the company having your information, I object to it being used to impact my life. I don't give a damn about them just having it. And thus my question, how does this affect my life?
For strong democracies to flourish, you can't have one corporation control the way its citizens access all information, from sea cables to browsers to proxying all the web through AMP.
The impact of these things on your life are major, disproportionately so according to your privilege and station, but the causality can sometimes be subtle, so we just shrug and carry on.
Right now, you're getting your needs met. But eventually, your needs, or the needs of someone you care for will be at a cross-roads with Alphabets best interest. Feeding them the information and critical mass they need to continue to exist now is what will allow them to take advantage of you in the future.
This is the classic "well, MY house isn't on fire yet" kind of thinking that gets us all burned in the end. All because the browser with the pinwheel logo is more familiar than the one with the fox on it.
I can only urge you to try to inform yourself, the information is unequivocally there for anyone to see, mass data collection by massive multinational corporations are limiting your civil liberties every day.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3983626/google-alphabet-washingto...
https://whyprivacymatters.org/
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...
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. :(
Great comment :) What beats one body gravity is bigger body's gravity. I escaped to Apple few years ago, except search. Safari should have custom search engine setting, though. Is it missing because of the deal with Google for default engine?
If only Google were my 10th biggest problem. Try to get Exxon, Shell, et al out of your life who aren't violating abstract principles but are literally killing the planet. Then let me get unethically farmed or raised foods out of my life (which, thanks to the US preoccupation with corn and the nitrogen it requires, are frequently overlapping with petroleum). Then let me get Oracle and Microsoft out of my life. Then l…
It'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?