251–260 of 665 posts
I would love to see a similar list for de-Apple-ing. Apple's anticompetitive and monopolistic practices with the App Store, the terrible direction MacBooks have taken, its price gouging on hardware... the list goes on. Google is saintly by comparison.
I think Google is great. It's convenient. Their search results are tailored to my liking, I love Gmail, I adore Google Docs/Sheets, and there are tons of tools I use almost every day as well. Honestly, the "switching away from [nameHere]" trend is so tiresome. Good job, you're a unique little snowflake now. You don't have Facebook, no LinkedIn, you don't use Google but DuckDuckGo, and you're even switching away from…
I use Google's products daily and agree they are often better than the competition. But do you not at least see the potential for a problem when gigantic semi-monopolistic tech companies control major parts of the societal methods for discourse and discovery, while collecting personal data from almost everyone? Are people who worry about this so unreasonable that they are deserving of flippant insults and name-calling?
> What's next? No more StackOverflow? No more using that popular package manager and, instead, installing all that stuff manually?
You give no convincing reason why that would be a probable next step, if you even believe it yourself. You buried your own point beneath so many layers of sarcasm that it is neither humorous nor insightful.
Any 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…
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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…
Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?
I hate using Office 365 with a passion. The usability is horrible. Google Docs is much more pleasant.
But in any environment where privacy or security matters, I'd pick it over Google Docs in a heartbeat. In my day job, I work with data with compliance issues. We use Microsoft technologies and zero Google. As obnoxious as Office 365 is, that's the right choice.
I think Google is great. It's convenient. Their search results are tailored to my liking, I love Gmail, I adore Google Docs/Sheets, and there are tons of tools I use almost every day as well. Honestly, the "switching away from [nameHere]" trend is so tiresome. Good job, you're a unique little snowflake now. You don't have Facebook, no LinkedIn, you don't use Google but DuckDuckGo, and you're even switching away from…
I observe that most people are willing to hold an opinion until they are inconvenienced. Society would be better if citizens backed their values with their actions. Convenience is not a value.
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None of those things affect my life. They may be moral or principle concerns for you, but they're not for me.
Why should i care for your opinion? It does not affect my life. See, its easy to type nonsense like this.
If we all cared about what every other hackernews user wrote ... We'd probably go a wee bit mad. Certainly my thumbs would be side from responding to y'all
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I think the biggest problem is Google becoming a monopoly, when you rely daily on tens of their services. Than, if for some reason, they decide to close your account or use your data to "be evil", there's not much you can do.
Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? I agree this would be a huge problem, but I'd be similarly devastated if my ISP stopped doing business with me, or any other email provider if I wasn't on gmail. True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. T…
What is relevant is whether or not they could, how easy it would be to do so, how damaging it could be, and what protections we would have once they have done so. This is the threat presented by internet monopolies and their fetish for violating our privacy.
Also consider that no company has managed to stay on top indefinitely. Once their growth slows, and they become desperate to appease shareholders, what won't they do to make that happen?
Long after fads have changed, supposed benevolent coding wunderkinds have moved on, the troves of data will still be there, ripe for the MBA's, the lawyers, the mitt romney's, god knows who, to leverage.
The argument "they've been nice about it so far, so why shouldn't we keep doing it?" is a fucking joke.
Genuinely, 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…
You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this case Google) have not only yours but everyone’s data. It’s astonishing what you can do with just some metadata. You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree.
You’re not just giving them your uninteresting data you’re also giving them an enormous amount of power.
I think Google is great. It's convenient. Their search results are tailored to my liking, I love Gmail, I adore Google Docs/Sheets, and there are tons of tools I use almost every day as well. Honestly, the "switching away from [nameHere]" trend is so tiresome. Good job, you're a unique little snowflake now. You don't have Facebook, no LinkedIn, you don't use Google but DuckDuckGo, and you're even switching away from…
Personally, I feel there's a lot to dislike about in the modern world. The 'advances' in technology also come with an increased speed at which things are done. I presume many, if not most would use the word "efficiency" to describe it.
But in the days before wireless phones, you would arrange places and times, and it would or wouldn't happen to the schedule, and you had to accept it.
So, although you label the people looking elsewhere a snowflake (made me laugh btw), I find the opposite is actually happening. Because people aren't being forced to learn the lesson of acceptance and that things are out of their control, we've created a binary world figuratively and literally where woke arguments clash with others at the speed of light. Everyday I discover there another group of people hating another... And use tech to do it: publically.
So, instead I see this push to decouple from goog, as desire for more autonomy and control in one's life. Everything these days is right at our fingertips, and goog was the first to bring this to us. Ironically, I see the snowflakes as those in this hyper connected world, where outrage exists under every tech interaction, because they've never had to learn acceptance. I find myself aligning myself with farmers, because they have to deal with acceptance a lot: from fixing machines in the middle of a field to burying animals. Everything is hard for a farmer, and tech solutions ultimately break at an inconvenient time.
If it weren't for people depending on me to provide some modicum of alternate communication and interaction using tech, I'd have left all it long ago. (But I accept this)
My friends have heard me talking of the desire for two tin cans and a piece of string. I think it's the way to go.
So, the short answer for me is no vpn, no goog, no ddg, no fastmail is better. Self host, only. I don't care for twits or public selfies.