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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#291

Post by dredmorbius »

gonehome wrote: post #109
neckardt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.

I treat email as an insecure mostly public form of communication. This is particularly true when most of the people you’re emailing have gmail anyway. Things like proton mail make no sense to me in that context. Fastmail works well and has design incentives aligned with the user, I thought they were the best of the options available when I switched.

Agree with your first point, but Protonmail is at least a marginal improvement.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#292

Post by Guidii »

Razengan wrote: post #171
aitchnyu wrote: post #67

I never considered a Gmail alternative since Gmail has primary/social/promotion/updates tabs and proper threading of replies and almost perfect spam protection. What services do the above things as good?

I have never used Gmail and never needed to. iCloud mail has been good enough for 9 years. • Does not ask for phone number. • Allows actual aliases (instead of a self-defeating YourRealAddress+Alias@Gmail.com) • Does not sneakily sign you into Search and every other Google service when you just want to check your email. In addition to all the privacy advantages.

I'm confused. Doesn't iCloud mail require an apple id, which in turn requires a lot of your pii?

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204316

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#293

Post by simplehuman »

twicetwice wrote: post #237
simplehuman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's risky.. hey does not have custom domains

Yet—as soon as they do, I'll probably jump to them. I'm using Zoho right now. That's the nice thing about having your email address at your own domain—I can move freely from provider to provider while using the same address!

Totally agreed

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#294

Post by Akababa »

millstone wrote: post #212
nickelpro wrote: post #61

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…

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.

They can't lock me out of my account if I do it myself first!

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#295

Post by jabirali »

submeta wrote: post #56
gonehome wrote: post #17

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…

I went basically the same route; got rid of my Google account (GMail, Android, etc.) and switched to an iPhone. The only things left where I indirectly use Google (see below) are precisely Google search and YouTube like you.

> 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.

I have the same experience; I’ve tried switching multiple times, but at least for scientific topics, I find DDG far inferior to Google Search. My current workaround is to use StartPage.com, which is just a website that searches Google for you, but without letting Google track you.

> Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.

If you don’t need to actively publish or comment on videos, you don’t need a Google account to get most of the convenience of YouTube. Personally, I just use a good old RSS client to track my YouTube feeds in the same place I track other content (e.g. HackerNews posts). If you say that you use iDevices, I can recommend “News Explorer”, which syncs your feeds via iCloud (in contrast to all the RSS solutions that require a separate sync account).

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#296

Post by drngdds »

734129837261 wrote: post #239

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…

If you love Google then you're not the target audience for this. It's for people who ~~acknowledge the obvious fact that~~ believe Google is evil and want to minimize their interaction with the company.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#297

Post by JKCalhoun »

734129837261 wrote: post #239

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…

Their search results suck. Are getting worse every year.

IMHO.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#298

Post by dragonwriter »

pydry wrote: post #184
strangescript wrote: post #129

Earlier 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. Everyone is tracking you online, but for some reason we only care about it when its companies that make good products that we like to use. Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? Meanwhile, I had an ad in my gmail yesterday for Google F…

>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…

> 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".

Dragnet surveillance of telcos, along with network/traffic analysis, which we've known about for a while, means avoiding any particular tech company is going to be irrelevant to concealing that you are an “undesirable” in any case unless you've taken pains to have your basic telecommunication somehow untraceable.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#299

Post by JKCalhoun »

nickelpro wrote: post #61

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…

If you have no problem with Google's stranglehold on advertising, their role in the demise of local news, brick and mortar business, local economies, and every other way they have contributed to the decline of the internet ... then by all means, enjoy the convenience.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#300

Post by dredmorbius »

nickelpro wrote: post #61

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…

Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the fathers of AI, wrote one of the better treatments of the possible future of computer-based data systems in his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society". In it, he addresses concerns:

The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...

There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:

https://ibmandtheholocaust.com

Whether or not it's possible to transact genocide at similar scale without computerised data records, it's quite clearly far easier to do so with them. Worse, with comprehensive records and rapid identification of any particular meddlesome priest, activist artist, or woman who was warned but nevertheless persisted, it's possible for such regimes, state or non-state, to dip in and retaliate with pinpoint effectiveness. Even the mere suggestion that this is possible can be extraordinarily chilling.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103059230160200494

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