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

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#631

Post by njacobs5074 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #412

njacobs5074 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the fascists deem you undesirable, they won’t need your email history. If history is any kind of guide, your neighbors are more likely to identify you to the new regime.

I thought the point of the internet is that it removes, to an extent, the friction of distance, meaning that the circles you move in may not be local to you. In the past, if I wanted to chat about politics I would have to do it with someone local or someone face to face. The postal service removed some of that friction, and now there is far less friction than that. I doubt your neighbours will know much about your po…

What you say is true.

I think the challenge is not only what you say but also what you don’t say or do?

In other words, do you say the “right” things, do you go to the same church, the same sports club, and so on.

It doesn’t take much for someone to be the wrong kind of neighbor once the fear takes over was my point.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#632

Post by mastazi » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:00 AM UTC

chalst wrote: post #494

mastazi wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).

I think Google's invasion of privacy can be regarded as a kind of "symbiotic parasitism" - they are able to leverage the information they harvest from you to improve search quality. A proxy won't give as good results as letting Google spy on you.

Yeah from my experience you get the kind of results that you would get from searching in an incognito window i.e. non-personalised (mmm although now that I think of it, they probably have fingerprinting techniques so that they can still track you while incognito)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

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Post by rootsudo » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #216

submeta wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, thanks for the link!

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#634

Post by bostonvaulter2 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 6:13 AM UTC

nuker wrote: post #396

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have a custom search setting, it's in the settings app.

I checked both Mac and iOS, its a fixed list, no option to add SearX for example. Funny enough, Yandex is missing from MacOS list (only options are Google, Yahoo, Bing and DDG), but present in iOS.

Ah, I see. I think you're correct. I didn't realize that you were looking for a fully custom option.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#635

Post by AndrewThrowaway » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

pydry wrote: post #613

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I both agree and disagree with you at the same time. Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it. If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark. However your local milkman can already have "a score" f…

>If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. Did you ask the Chinese citizens in Chongqing if they can "just ignore" their social score coz they're not in Beijing? The answer may surprise.

My thought is that if fascist government takes over, Minnesota at first would be something like Hong Kong. It is not like social scoring could/would happen overnight. At first you would need a lot of people to believe in it, a lot of people to support it and etc.

I understand that things would not so simple of course.

My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#636

Post by agarzenm » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #573

agarzenm wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned? Have you considered this in your threat model?

I give an answer for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733 In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law). You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.

Apologies for only getting back to you now.

Yeah this is all fine once you have accepted the trade offs and designed your threat model around it. People get extremely zealous around this sort of shit.

One decision for another person does not need to be taken by everyone else just because it makes sense for you.

I, like you am concerned about the use of data but I take a different approach. I don't mind if my data is used for product insight/generation once it is aggregated anonymized data, with the caveat that the website and or service is GDPR compliant.

I give bonus points to any website that lets you nuke your account from the profile page without having to jump through e-mail hoops. I had a recent experience of requesting an account erasure under GDPR via e-mail. I expected the usual "are you sure?", "do you know the implications?", "who are you?" but no they just deleted the account straight away. I only found out it had been done by trying to login to the service again.

10/10

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#637

Post by ganafagol » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

torgian wrote: post #499

throwaway936482 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa

I’d argue the opposite. I’m China they can just kidnap you. In America, at least there are rules.

But that's not what your parent post is about. It's about that in America, you need to worry more about U.S. surveillance than about Chinese surveillance. And when in China, you need to worry more about Chinese surveillance than American surveillance.

What you state has nothing to do with that. If I understand you right, you are saying that you should be more worried in China than in the U.S. overall. That might be true, I can't judge. I can imagine there are rules in China too, maybe they are just not so pleasent? And I suspect some folks in Portland have some mixed feelings about the "just kidnap" part too.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

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Post by RonanTheGrey » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 7:40 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #611

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing If you don't want to be, don't post here. Oh, don't like it? That's what you're telling to the people who are disagreeing with you. But it doesn't affect you right? In 7 years this is the first time I've ever seen an honest to god troll on HN. What a first.

Yikes, please don't post like this here. We ban accounts that do personal attacks, regardless of how wrong the other person is or how right you are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: please don't post flamewar comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24250511 either. It's really not what this site is for.

Thank you dang message received and my apologies. You are right.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#639

Post by ganafagol » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 7:42 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…

Hm your move from google to iCloud begs the question: You don't see any issues moving from one big-vendor-"free"-lock-in solution to another?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#640

Post by bad_user » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC

henearkr wrote: post #530

bad_user wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads can be contextual, served based on the content you view, and Google's own Ad Words does in fact just that, as they serve ads based on your search keywords, and that's their biggest revenue source. People have issues with user profiling , tracking users to gather their interests, and follow them with ads on certain topics across the web. Which is now illegal to do without explicit opt-in consent in the EU. Google…

In this case you don't need to ditch Gmail, they don't use anymore this data to custom ads. However each time you visit any website, your enemies are not only Google Ads but also Criteo, Facebook, etc (and they are much much less conscientious than Google about how they use and distribute the fruits of this harvest).

I agree. But I still think it's worth it to ditch Gmail, or at least the free version.

People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it.

If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite and your own domain.

I have my own domain, it's paid for 10 years in advance, I host my email at Fastmail, but if I get unhappy with Fastmail, I can change the email provider in an hour.