Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life • Hacker News Board

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#401

Post by ekianjo » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

throwmeaway2344 wrote: post #397

switch11 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

If you are worried about American intelligence don't use anything based in the US.

You can say the same thing for anything based outside of the US. You think China-based services don't have the CCP spy on their users, like TikTok?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#402

Post by anonymousab » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

bryan_w wrote: post #302

anonymousab wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? Someone tries to access your account from a random place, or maybe an old camera video you uploaded to youtube gets flagged erroneously by some contentid or appropriate content automation, and an automated system locks your account permanently, with you forever losing access to your e…

Why wouldn't you backup your data periodically? You would if you self hosted, it's the same for online services

I'd wager that the vast majority of people don't, or certainly don't for emails.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#403

Post by ekianjo » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

switch11 wrote: post #352

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…

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

> Trying to find an alternative to Android.

You have the Pinephone nowadays. You will lose a lot moving from Android to a Linux based phone, especially if you rely on native applications.

https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-revi...

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#404

Post by DJN » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:36 AM UTC

Obsnold wrote: post #386

I would be happy to pay Google a monthly fee for all their services. Mainly just so I feel like a customer instead of a product and to give me the peace of mind that if something goes wrong I can talk to a person that can help me. At the moment I'm looking out for whatever service provider will let me have the equivalent of email, drive, calendar, docs and sheets all in one place. Does anyone know of any that might h…

Office 365?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#405

Post by asdsadxcxcxcz » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

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…

Would you say the same if you lived in China?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#406

Post by brigandish » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

granzymes wrote: post #224

pydry wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or they go after the people who have tried to hide themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 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.

Risk is not only an estimate of the extent of harm if something happens but the likelihood of it happening, hence they're not prepping for Doomsday - which would be fairly pointless - but worse case scenario, of which there are several vying for the title of worst case, each with varying chance.

I'd rather liken it to fastening my seatbelt than prepping for Doomsday.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#407

Post by ScroogeMcDoug » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #326

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…

This is a textbook false dichotomy. You're basically saying there are two choices 1) use whatever is convenient with absolutely no regard for privacy or 2) don't use computers at all and put on a tinfoil hat. > Where do you draw the line? Clearly they've drawn it to exclude Google, what's the problem with that?

There's obviously no inherent problem, but their reasoning is all theoretical and there's no reason not to expand it further based on their own logic. If you don't trust Google, why would you trust any of the other major players online like AWS, Azure, Cloudflare etc? Without those the internet basically doesn't work and you'd be better off not even bothering, thus meaning option 2 is the end result of the privacy minded.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#408

Post by Proziam » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:40 AM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #365

ciarannolan wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unique in this regard, therefore it doesn't matter? Is that your argument? Also, comparing the relative power of newspaper men to Google doesn't make much sense.

>It's not unique in this regard, therefore it doesn't matter? Is that your argument? Yes. Any group that controls information distribution controls what we know about the world. By controlling what we know about the world, they control politics completely. This is axiomatic, there is no way around it, you can't personally observe everything that happens therefore you must have it reported to you. The person or people…

> Yes. Any group that controls information distribution controls what we know about the world. By controlling what we know about the world, they control politics completely.

I agree, so I want to deny as much information and power to powerful institutions as possible and diversify my relationships with them such that it becomes less likely that any one could become the Kingmaker.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#409

Post by stilisstuk » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:40 AM UTC

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…

Not an alternative, bit insidious is aborter frontend to YouTube... and om Android there is newpipe.

However, for me, the problems are: Maps. Google Maps are great. Calendar: my calender provider online has ICS calendar sharing, not e.g. itip.and imip.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#410

Post by DavideNL » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #346

DavideNL wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, but I simply forwarded ALL incomming e-mail from my old Gmail to my new email address. That way, i did not have to change all website accounts at once. So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.

What is Google's policy on accounts set up to forward all mail re: scanning contents of forwarded messages?

I don't think it really matters; Google has a track record of abusing privacy (regardless of what the policy is.)