Personally, I think Google is just as terrifying, possibly more.
As an example, just take a fairly normal life situation like going out for dinner with some friends, and think about how much of it goes "through" Google:
---
One of your friends sends an email to 6 others, to ask if everyone's free for dinner on Friday. 5 of the 7 people involved use gmail or a google apps address.
You've never heard of the restaurant they're suggesting, so you search for it on Google to see what kind of food it is.
You click to the restaurant's site. It uses Google Analytics, so even though you're no longer on Google, it still knows the exact path you take through the site while you're "outside".
You decide the restaurant looks good, and enter the dinner into Google Calendar.
On Friday, you use Google Maps to get to the restaurant, so Google knows exactly where you were before, what time you left, and the route you took. While you're driving, maybe you send a couple of text messages using the Google voice assistant.
At the restaurant, it turns out your friend Doug is there, even though he wasn't part of the emails. During dinner, you're all trying to remember the name of that movie where Shaq plays a genie, so both you and Doug grab your phones and google for phrases like "shaq movie genie" at about the same time. Even though Doug wasn't included in any of the planning, Google now knows that you're almost certainly together, and what you're talking about.
You finish your meal and pay via the restaurant's Square system, which emails the receipt to your gmail address. Google now knows exactly what you ate, and how much you paid for it.
You use Google Maps again when leaving, telling Google exactly how long you stayed at the restaurant and where you're going next.
---
I didn't even push that very far. There are multiple other things I could have easily added, and you can do this with almost any situation. It's quite insane how much Google knows about what people are doing all the time, and the level of detail they can get by combining these things.
Facebook is like a Casino. They'll try to maneuver to keep you engaged and contain you in their bubble. However, if you're able to leave or cut your usage, they extend no influence whatsoever. (Don't have mobile apps installed, block their trackers, don't use Facebook login, etc) There are lots of ways to communicate outside of Facebook, including other messaging apps that help you form social networks outside of it. My extended family use Line for communication.
Google on the other hand is like the road. You can't avoid the road.
> However, if you're able to leave or cut your usage, they extend no influence whatsoever.
My friends often upload pictures of me, tagged with GPS coordinates and user; And even though most have stopped tagging me (as I have asked), Facebook often does offer them to tag me, which means that Facebook has enough pictures of me to identify me in random pictures (even though I never uploaded a single one myself).
Google collects information from users themselves, and have some info from people mailing them (if you are not on google yourself, it's likely more than half your emails are still coming or going to a google server).
But Facebook has co-opted your friends and family to spy on you, all day every day. Very much big brother.
When you upload photos to Facebook as part of an album, my experience is it doesn't even ask: it just goes ahead and tags people it recognizes, and it even sends them a push notification that you did that even before you click "save" on the album (it even attempts to live synchronize the text you are typing as the album description, which is insane).
In my imaginary screenplay, a guy is hiding from the US government, but the NSA will find him because they have access to Facebook's face recognition system, and he happens to be in the background of a photo a tourist took.. "We have a face recognition hit, he's in... Thailand!"
I'm willing to bet the difference is purely cosmetic. Facebook likely still runs facial recognition on all uploaded photos even if it doesn't suggest tags.
> which means that Facebook has enough pictures of me to identify me in random pictures (even though I never uploaded a single one myself).
Facebook probably uses more than just facial recognition, it can also use the metadata. They know who uploaded it, so they can narrow down the "list of candidate faces" from 7 billion to the much smaller number of people your friend knows/tags people in photos.
You can't avoid FB either. It tracks you even if you're not logged in, and even if you don't have an account. And by tracking you across sites it can infer your age group, gender, sexual orientation, political leanings, income bracket, and other personal preferences through simple co-visitation mining. And they know your rough location via geolocation, too, as well as how many people live in your household, whether you have kids and how old they are (assuming they browse the web), etc. None of this requires you to volunteer any data about yourself, and none of this (in the US) requires your consent.
> It tracks you even if you're not logged in, and even if you don't have an account. And by tracking you across sites it can infer your age group, gender, sexual orientation, political leanings, income bracket, and other personal preferences through simple co-visitation mining.
I've logged into Facebook in incognito mode for the last decade. It's really not that difficult to avoid doing this. By contrast, I might visit a dozen different Google services over the course of the day, their apps are a lot more indispensable (mobile web Maps is no fun), etc so it's a lot higher effort to do so for them.
Sure you can -- install an adblocker or one of the other extensions that allows you to block FB tracking. I agree that that only protects those tech-savvy enough to know how FB is tracking you and what to do about it, but there are steps we can take while fighting against corporate mass surveillance.
The book Addiction by Design is really good for understanding the science of casinos and how social media may or may not be using those tactics. Not hard to spot the coincidences
I hate to break it to you but the state police and most toll road authorities have put an entire network of cameras on every major interstate and road system to be able to track cars.
Even outside the US this is true. I live in Lithuania and a couple years ago I started noticing cameras along the side of most highways. They've now started using them to enforce average speeds, but to everyone here it should be pretty clear they are tracking the movements of vehicles (whether intentional or not is a different question).
A lot of other European countries have automated toll roads (sometimes just for HGVs) which do the same thing.
One of the upshots at least of living in countries other than America that follow its worst practices are that they're generally much worse in execution, i.e. they end up making it obvious
Most developed countries have similar systems in place. Heck, I'd wager that the US is lagging behind other countries in this area, primarily due to its size.
Having cameras and having an effective tracking system based on them is a big difference. (No idea about the swedish situation, but in Germany proposals to give police access to information from traffic enforcement cameras for criminal cases have been a huge topic)
* Pay in cash, or pay using pre-paid credit cards that you change every couple of months.
* For real paranoia, get a VPN app and pick a new country & server every day.
Email is harder if you are emailing people who use gmail. For what it is worth, as of June 2017 gmail no longer scans email content for ads (in both commercial and consumer/free gmail - https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...) Personally I use my inbox as my calendar - dont think you're missing much by just not using calendar at all unless you have a very, very hectic schedule.
I deleted my facebook account many years ago. I've not missed it.
I've been trying to use DDG for the last 6 months. Ultimately I'd say 40% of my queries I now just force google with '!g' instead. I was quite bullish on it 6 months ago, but must admit that after 6 months, anything complex I !g straightaway.
I've had the opposite experience. I've been using it for many months and I only !g code searches or searches where DDG's results were disappointing, most of which end up disappointing on Google as well.
I've also used DuckDuckGo for years now, often for programming questions, and the handful of times I've resorted to !g it was 50/50 as to whether Google had better results.
It's given that Google will give better search results. They track you.
I have the opposite experience regarding programming questions though. I thought that part of the initial appeal of DDG was that it handled queries that involved syntax or symbols better. I suppose these types of queries may not be that "complex" though. I admit I often query just to verify the API or to check how to do a common task in a language I am less familiar with.
That is also laughable and more than a bit insulting:
- most of the answers (I encountered) are in fact proper and correct answers because bascially it's a peer-reviewed environment, so no need for those snarky quatation marks. I, and many others, have spent hours and hours writing down good answers, and learning quite a bit while doing so.
- DDG/Google/... know about SO so it is often possible to get these answers way faster than when using the reference documentation, and your brain cannot change much about it
- you'll find answers which are nowhere to be found in the reference documentation - I assume your point is that with enough reference documentation and thinking any complex programming problem can be tackled. Well, yeah I guess, but it takes way more time than needed and anecdotally I have seen code written by people thinking that and it was one horrid mess. Mostly because stuff like 'good practices' and insight in design principles and patterns and whatnot isn't found in reference documentation. While via frequenting SO (and similar, before that existed) you pick up this stuff automatically and it makes you reflect on programming which in turn makes you better. If you use your brain, that is.
I have been using zealdocs for a couple months now. Which is basically offline official docs/tutorials/examples my Google and SO usage has dropped quite a bit. If you read the Stackoverflow post on why they discontinued their documentation feature - one of the reasons was official docs aren't as broken as ppl think.
Why is Googling a programming question insulting to the profession?
I find it laughable that you think there is something wrong with looking for resources relating to complex programming questions. I can't tell you how many times Googling a niche and complex problem instantly solved my issue. Sometimes SO is the only site that has fixes for bugs in the program you're using or mistakes in the documentation.
Well Google is pretty shit if the same keyword combos occur in multiple complex answers. It can even be a waste of time/send you off on a wild goose chase VS just reading a book. Google benefits from the fact that most people's attention spans and patience has dropped.
What really killed google for me was their gradual transition to showing results that are the most popular thing that's merely related to your search terms. Whereas DDG wouldn't show me many good results for some searches, google shows me endless links to high-profile stuff that is explicitly not what I asked for. Contrived example: search for "vegan meals", and google goes "vegan, hmm.. oh, MEALS! Yes! Here's everything I know about MEALS! Here's some steaks you should buy!" The only way I can get good results out of google these days is to perform the search, then switch it to verbatim mode.
This is taking "but it's so convenient to give up my privacy!" to a new level. Now it's "but if I don't give up my privacy can't micro-optimize my life!"?
For framework configuration questions just search Stack(Overflow|Exchange) directly. For local results append the name of your city.
Try using startpage. It's essentially a proxy for google, but since lots of people are using it, it has no way to connect the searches. And by using it, you're actually improving its privacy by increasing the number of different people whose traffic comes to google from startpage.
Information saved locally is the main way sites such as google identify you (cookies mainly).
If you open an incognito window for all your searches, do not signin and close it right after, search engine will not associate your searches with you.
This is not enough to protect you from an evil company or government, but will affect which ads are presented to you, your search results, and should prevent your name from being associated with those searches should that search company date be compromised.
Lately I've been wondering whether I should withdraw most of my money from the bank. Any serious drawback to that approach? For one, I don't like my transactions being tracked and two, find it outrageous I have to pay various fees to use/access my money while it is used to enrich others.
You can address your two problems without dropping the bank.
You should be quite able to find a bank or credit union that will hold your money without charging a fee. Where are you?
You can still use cash to avoid tracking, and you can even thwart forensics by making regular uniform withdrawals. The neat thing is that patterning like this makes you less susceptible to analysis but far more susceptible to getting mugged because now we know that you pull $400 every Tuesday at 3pm. Pick your poison.
> find it outrageous I have to pay various fees to use/access my money while it is used to enrich others.
Where are you banking? My bank pays me interest, even on my checking account, and I don't need to worry about a burglar taking all my savings. There's no reason you can't keep your money at the bank, stop using credit cards, and pay everything in cash; all the bank will know is that you withdraw $200 every week.
Think long and hard about secure storage then. Fireproof safe, bolted to the wall, at the least. Also, carrying wads of cash with you when you travel is a security risk, either via theft, or just by losing it.
I just installed Brave. Then I realized it doesn't allow Chrome extensions? I have so many ranging from email notifiers to cookie opt-outs to my own custom extensions for security and usability (like one that colors usernames on HN, for example)... how should I give all those up just to use a different browser?
The conclusion I've come to regarding Google is that you just have to accept it for now. The services that they provide are so above and beyond anything from any other provider that to not use them puts you at a great disadvantage. Google search is an order of magnitude above the competition. There is no serious alternative to Google maps. The level of integration that Google Calendar has with practically everything is unmatched. As such I've placed my trust for now in Google and only Google. That's the key. I've decided to collocate all of my privacy concerns to one single company which I feel is at least moderately trustworthy, and which supports an open Web. Because in the end, I do not think that Google is fundamentally evil.
Facebook on the other hand provides absolutely nothing of value to anyone really. The entirety of their service can be replaced with an IRC client and a free image host. The walled garden they have cultivated will be laughed at in the future the same way we see AOL now. I am completely convinced that they are a fundamentally evil company. The sooner the world realizes that it is nothing more than a creepy spying/advertisement platform the better.
Neither is "fundamentally evil", and also both are. They are both corporations attempting to keep you in their ecosystem, using similar methods, that fundamentally make their money from targeting ads to you. There's no evil overlord at the top of either company (I hope) - their evilness must be judged by how likely each of them are to lead us into a techno-dystopia. And the more you consolidate to Google, the closer they become to The Corporation from every dystopian sci-fi ever.
Also, Facebook does provide something of value, though the cost is too great: they are the centralised provider of the One True Social Graph, and by extension your True Identity, which has numerous uses and no decentralised competitor. It's increasingly popular to use Facebook login on third party sites, because it mitigates to some extent the creation of throwaway accounts, which was hitherto considered a largely intractable problem.
> There's no evil overlord at the top of either company (I hope)
We'll have to disagree here. I think Zuckerberg is an evil, amoral person to his core. This hardly needs reposting, but I can't recall Brin or Page ever going on the record calling their users "dumb fucks".[0]
Sure. And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously remarked on the subject of privacy, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Whatever you think of the people, corporations are not people and their behaviour is only partially directed by them. The most reliable predictor of their direction is their bottom line, and the intelligence of the people they hire to improve it.
Bear in mind that Google was so self-aware of the abuse potential of their position that they adopted "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto - until they dropped it on the grounds that it was underspecified, which strikes me as a quintessential example of corporate amoralism - evil, if you will.
Personally - I'm very aware that both track people obsessively, and I don't really go in for cheerleading US megacorps. However - Facebook feels a lot more evil to me.
It's the constant cat and mouse game. I go in periodically to tighten my security settings and close off more notifications, and they find new vectors to spam me into coming back into their walled garden. Their "frictionless sharing" always feels more like "frictionless privacy betrayal", as it's totally in their interest to disseminate whatever info they can gain as widely as possible. To blur the line between private and public for their benefit.
I don't close my account completely, because I go in once a year to thank people for the birthday greets. They find 21st century AOL more convenient for this than email.
In contrast, I'm one of those oddballs who still uses Google+. Almost exclusively with remote family, to share photos that we've taken during the week to talk about during a hangout. The default sharing "circle" is limited to close family, and that works well.
Feels like a pretty different experience from FB to me.
Plus, I think FB's aggressive cultivation of online relationships erodes old meatspace ones. It's human nature that just casually swiping on your smartphone screen for a status refresh and dopamine hit from your sofa is going to be easier than arranging to meet groups of friends in person. I've certainly found this with some people who live in the same city as me. So I wouldn't say FB is useless - I think it's slightly worse than that.
>Sure. And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously remarked on the subject of privacy, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
This is constantly posted out of context.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
He is talking about not using their services because they are subject to US law, which specifically violates privacy by its very nature.
Schmidt also said:
"You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it. Whenever there’s a conflict, the logic of security will trump the right to privacy."
Whenever someone posts this comment in response to the out of context quote, I think to my self that it still really doesn't change my opinion or reading of it.
The dumb part about what Schmidt said is he presumes there is nothing worthwhile about privacy before quickly alluding to a legitimate need for it.
The point about US law is less relevant for me, it's his immediate gut reaction to the legitimacy of privacy.
>Bear in mind that Google was so self-aware of the abuse potential of their position that they adopted "Don't be evil" as a corporate motto - until they dropped it on the grounds that it was underspecified, which strikes me as a quintessential example of corporate amoralism - evil, if you will.
This is why Zuckerberg and Facebook bothers me so much. He is seemingly completely unaware or unwilling to admit the potential for abuse that his technology has created. His messianic complex disallows him from even acknowledging that perhaps there are tradeoffs being made in the name of "connecting the world (that is, making absurd profits)" which are compromising the very stability of our civilization.
This is such a stupid argument. He was what, 20 years old? And FB was a tiny nothing at that point. And let's face it, he probably wasn't wrong to think that users were dumb to upload private data to some random POS website.
I'm sure you never said anything at 20 on IM with a friend that could be used in isolation more than a decade later to show that you're an evil person, right?
The context is actually much worse than the "dumb fucks". He was actively offering to share the information of his users with his friend - "selling" it as it were for mere social kudos. It shows that even at that early stage, he perceived Facebook as a vehicle for collecting and exploiting the personal info of his users, exploiting even before he had a clear idea of how.
I keep seeing HN users who clearly have an irrational hatred of Zuckerburg trot out this stupid quote as if it proves anything, let alone that he's some kind of megalomaniac. Just really annoys me. It always reeks of jealousy and sour grapes to me :)
This is like saying people who are defending FB have some agenda where they don't like seeing criticism against it. For example, you could be someone who coaches freelancers who might hang out on HN and also be coaching them on using FB ads. Remember that when you point out that others may have agendas, there is always the issue that you could be subject to the very same suspicion.
In any case, the real issue isn't that Zuckerberg thought his users were "dumb fucks" when he was young. The issue is that he keeps acting as if he believes it, till today. Take the example of the WhatsApp acquisition. A lot of people, even here on HN, rooted for the WhatApp mantra of "no ads, ever". Now they have clearly been cheated. Interestingly, the usual response to those who complain about this spectacular bait and switch is - "it isn't FB's fault if WhatsApp users were 'too dumb' to trust the words of the company's founder". The lack of ethics amongst these founder types has somehow now become a burden to be borne by the "dumb fucks" who pay for these services with a lack of privacy.
Someone once asked here what is wrong with shadow profiles - that is, why are they actually illegal. The answer was prompt and quite clear - "because those who don't have accounts on FB but have shadow profiles have never explicitly agreed to the ToS". I think if anyone is willing to dig deeper into this issue, it will lead to the same conclusion at a much larger scale - there was nothing "legally wrong" going on, except a large mass of people acting like "dumb fucks" by say, not reading the ToS carefully. Hey, what do you know, supply people with mass quantities of undecipherable garbage called the ToS, and most people are too "dumb" to understand its implications. The assumption of dumbness amongst your users, it turns out, can take you very far - even towards trillion dollar valuations.
Recently, there was this story about the EU fine of 1% of turnover if FB was found guilty of misleading claims. "Those dumb fucks", Zuckerberg probably thought,"the price of providing misleading information is just 1% of the turnover? Who put these dumb fucks in charge?"
I would be very happy to supply more examples if you ask for it.
> I would be very happy to supply more examples if you ask for it.
I'd love an answer to a different question: why do so many tech reporters etc think he's some kind of f'ing genius? Beyond the usual success-worship that is. For instance all of his presidential posturing, I was surprised how little ridicule there was, instead it was "well sure he's a tech genius, but can he really do politics"? I have seen zero evidence of tech brilliance, just ruthless eyeball gathering and ad shilling.
We have to be careful with the 'evil' thing. The fact that they are not 'evil' now does not mean that in the future they will not. People retire, companies evolve, the information stays.
I think the argument that they're trying to lick you into their ecosystem is a bit dishonest.
I don't recall FB doing much for lock-in. They basically have only three products, and two of them are just as integrated with things like Twitter as with FB (modulo inline picture expansion of Instagram, which is Twitter's doing)
Google uses your emails to put reminders into your Google Calendar. Uses your Google Calendar to add context to Maps.
The simple reading is just that they had an opportunity to integrate their products. In theory they could offer this integration with other mail providers or calendars.
In practice , do you think MSFT or Yahoo are going to let Google check your emails? Probably not.
Not that Google hasnt done a couple uncompetitive things (Chrome advertising when using FF is a bit much). But the reality is that Google has access to data that can make better usability. And it's kinda hard to do with third party services that are all also building Google-like ecosystems too.
But I have a bunch of third party calendars in Google calendar. I email other people with my Gmail account. I can install Firefox on my Android phone. I can Google search through DDG.
> The services that they provide are so above and beyond anything from any other provider that to not use them puts you at a great disadvantage.
Five years ago I would have agreed but at this point most of the advantages offered by Google's services are non-essential conveniences. Google's competition has caught up faster than they have added new 'must have' features.
You don't want to run your own mail/web server. At least, you do not want a lot of people doing it. Because most of the will get the security part wrong. Horribly wrong.
Apple Maps has also become a serious competitor. Apple is still playing catch-up in some ways but every year they keep closing the gap further. Almost every 'catch up' feature they have added is as good or better than Google's implementation. In the same time period Google Maps hasn't improved much and has taken some steps backwards in UI.
> The conclusion I've come to regarding Google is that you just have to accept it for now. The services that they provide are so above and beyond anything from any other provider that to not use them puts you at a great disadvantage.
Dear lord this isn't even remotely true.
I haven't used any Google services save Maps for nearly 5 years now and I only used Maps a few times when I first learned to drive before realising that OSMand and HERE Maps were actually better.
That's just one example. There are alternatives to pretty much everything Google offers, some even better.
The only thing Google offers that isn't matched is seamless integration between its various services, but if you are not heavily invested in the Google ecosystem to begin with, or are not resistant to change then its not an issue at all to move away from it.
Honestly the most dofficult part of stopping using Google is switching all your email addresses over for the various online services you use. That takes a few hours at most.
Google uses the information they collect on you to target their ads (and who knows what else), just as Facebook does. They happen to have a bit more window dressing that is of actual utility. All that makes them is a bit smarter but not fundamentally better than FB.
It's pretty incredible. Search history and e-mail alone almost certainly reveal staggering amounts of personal information about most people.
I try to "spread" my data. Apple for maps/messaging/photos, Signal, DuckDuckGo, Gmail, and primarily private tab web surfing. I also use different browsers for different concerns. And of course ad blockers although I'm not sure I've installed them everywhere. With my lack of social media accounts and a reup of my PIA subscription it feels like it should be a fairly private set up.
Of course, if I was really going all the way I'd use cash for everything, and curb the very modest amount of shopping I do on Amazon. I believe creeit cards almost certainly sell information based on your purchase history.
Oh! And don't forget a hat and sunglasses to avoid the myriad of cameras I'd come across in my day to day as a metropolitan.
And of course to turn off wi-fi and bluetooth when in transit. Might even be better to go into airplane mode.
So yea, just get a landline. Use snail mail (although addresses may be scanned). Hang a calendar on the wall (they are pretty, mine is pictures of Italy), stay off social media, use cash, disguise your features, and I dunno, use the internet at the library or something.
In the end, it's a giant pain and it's amazing how many vectors there are for information retrieval on the average citizen of the information age.
Regarding cash vs credit card. Google already has your credit card data too.
> Google says it has access to roughly 70% of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with companies that track that data. By matching ad clicks with this data, Google says it can automatically inform merchants when their digital ads translate into sales at a physical store.
Oi mate, just wanna say: What a blood brilliant app you cats have built.
As a nutritionist myself, with poor blood glucose control if I'm not careful and emotionally affective wheat intolerance, your app, at first glance, looks amazing and very comprehensive. Well done!
If any of ya'll ever find yourself in Tasmania be sure to look me up, email on profile.
Haha I just noticed your username could be a reference too.
And thanks, that's awesome to hear! A lot of parts of the app are definitely a work in progress, and its tough to make appealing looking meal plans that also consistently hit arbitrary nutrition goals. But we're steadily making progress. Never been to Tasmania, but I'll be sure to let you know :)
It gets even more frightening if you realize that you're probably not even considering all of the "deeper" levels. Almost everything I listed in my comment was pretty surface-level stuff, where it's at least somewhat obvious that you're giving the data to them (some things like the analytics not so much, but still not really "hidden").
But now start thinking about some other things:
- Are any of the sites you're using hosted on GCP (or other Google-owned hosting)?
- Even if they're not, do they include any scripts/images/fonts/etc. from other sites that are?
- How much network infrastructure does Google own now? How much of your traffic is passing through it?
Even if you don't install any GApps, Android would still ping Google servers. I can't remember exactly since it was a while ago, but IIRC it was some hardcoded NTP server.
For Google to collect data on their platform customers' layer 7 traffic would be a pretty big breach of trust (i .e. hacking if they were using HTTPS)
If they are just collecting TCP data and selling it to third party marketers or building analytics profiles it would be a lot of work to reliably connect that to humans for little benefit, along with risk to their reputation.
I use 5% cashback card from my amazon card (chase bank) and one of its disclaimers when you sign up is that it sells your product purchases to advertisers
t's pretty incredible. Search history and e-mail alone almost certainly reveal staggering amounts of personal information about most people
And if you are foolish enough to use 8.8.8.8 for your DNS, they get every site you visit, every network activity requiring a lookup in fact, even where you SSH to.
Lately, I'm getting even more paranoid with Google.
I have the location in my Android inactive and everytime I open google maps I get the message:
"To continue, let your device turn on location, which uses Google's location service. cancel - ok"
I have to click cancel every time. I think the language is disingenuous, because if you click cancel you can use the maps anyway. I suppose I should stop using Google Maps.
I use duckduckgo in my android, and the other day I realized that the keyboard where I'm typing is "Gboard - The Google Keyboard".
I suppose it's not calling home with every key, but who knows?, or, if it's not calling, if this will change in the future.
Nokia HERE WeGo[1] also does offline GPS maps. You can download whole countries as vector map data.
MAPS.ME looks really good but I know some areas around here don't have great OpenStreetMap data yet, whereas they do have complete road data on Nokia's app.
Cool! FWIW, around Pacific North West, I found OpenStreetMap data is significantly more detailed than Google's for hiking and pedestrian points of interest.
You have listed all the reasons that make Android very valuable for Google. At the same time, do you believe Google can be as evil as Facebook? I personally believe it isn't and won't be (so it's just the lesser evil).
I wouldn't trust Facebook to not be evil, based on its poor track record on privacy and treating users badly as well as its highly ambitious and callous founder/CEO. I'm also sure that Facebook has been working on dismantling the Google ecosystem or bypassing it wherever possible to control and retain user attention.
Personally I believe Google _IS_ much worse than FB for one simple reason: it's much easier to avoid FB than Google.
With FB the story is simple. You'll miss out on some news/invites from FB-centric friends, but it's pretty easy to go without (or to even find new friends who aren't as hooked on FB as needed).
"Avoiding" Google in your daily life is much, much harder. Their free mail offering is still top-notch. Their search is absolutely incredible. Depending on what you do this list can go on and on. Also, these are things we can't really just "do without" like in FB's case. Alternatives do exist, but often are either paid or not as good.
Personally, I'n going to try and transition away from Google this year just to see how far I can get. Should be an interesting experiment.
I can recommend Fastmail. No affiliation, just a happy customer. I've used Gmail for several years previously and thought I'd miss it when switching. I didn't.
I also use Fastmail. No affiliations, just a content customer.
I pay for a mobile telephone service, but email is more important to me so my convictions necessitate a paid email service from a dedicated provider with a real support team.
I also own my own domain, primarily because now my email address is short and unambiguous to say over the phone.
Late reply, but I would recommend Posteo [1] because it's flexible and very cheap if you need multiple accounts. I switched to it a year ago to move out of Gmail and other "free" services.
Fastmail is, for my needs of a few mailboxes (each with its own credentials), very expensive - running into few hundred dollars a year!
Another similar and cheap alternative is Mailbox, which allows custom domains to be used.
Both the services allow IMAP, which was very important for me to have local copies of emails if I ever decide to migrate out.
Someone hijacked an older google account of mine, the phone number used had since run out and been sold to another user.
Google asked me to either have access to the phone number, and the old password, or to know the security question, have access to the backup email, and know the exact day the account was created on.
Google was not willing to provide any help, not even via the Nexus phone support, and even after a friend who worked at Google submitted an internal recovery form.
After I contacted the new owner of the phone number, and coordinated with him a way for me to authorize via SMS, backup email, old password, security question, and account creation date at the same time, I got back into the account.
In the account I found an email from Google's account recovery support thanking me for contacting them, apparently they had contacted the hijacker after I asked for help, not me.
After changing all data, I went through the login history.
The account was set to German, always used from Germany. Someone tried logging in via several different VPNs, and was blocked a few times, but allowed the last time from Russia.
I had learnt the account was compromised originally because Google sent me an email that an attacker from Russia had logged into the account and changed the password.
So, to recap:
Google realizes that an attacker connects and hijacks an account, emails me, but doesn't prevent it.
Google allows that person to change the password, and tells me that an attacker changed the password, but provides no way to restore it, and doesn't block it.
You can't restore with backup email, security question and old password.
Once Google's internal account recovery team was contacted, they talked with the attacker, not with me, despite being explicitly told I had no control over the account.
A random person was more helpful with restoring the account than Google itself.
Do NOT ever rely on Google, and write down your accountcreation date right now (on desktop, in gmail, settings, pop3 and imap, "pop3 active since" tells you the account creation date)
Asking for a phone number as a verification method is particularly toxic for users such as myself who do a lot of international travel and essentially just use phones for data plans.
Due to a close call with one of my own accounts, I absolutely refuse to link a phone number to any online account, for fear of it being required months later when I'm in another country. I still nearly gotten bitten by this problem when Google wanted to use my old android phone itself as a secondary identification method. AFICT, the only safe solution is to also avoid using Android phones (or have no Google accounts you'd care about losing).
Oh, the backup email worked. But to restore it's not enough. You need either
a) old password, SMS
b) security question, email , date of account creation.
And I didn't update the phone number because I had stopped using the account, and had forgotten about it (but I also obviously didn't want anyone to spam in my name, or extract my data).
Many stories have been posted here over the years of people whose Google accounts got disabled for some unknown reason, with no way of contacting someone at Google to get the issue resolved. A quick web search turned up this example:
I run copperhead on a nexus device (no gapps) use fastmail for email contacts and calendars duckduckgo for search plex and icecast for media matrix for chat mastodon for social media fix standard notes for note taking
YouTube is a challenge, but you can always use youtube-dl and watch via plex asynchronously
the only missing but for me is replacing photos. Plex does and ok job, but it isn't quite as seamless as I would like.
Sure, Google's probably (hopefully) not doing anything "evil" with all this data right now, but are you absolutely certain that they never will in the future? That they'll never be forced to give access to the data to others? That they'll never get hacked?
Because you don't get the option to take your data back, ever. So you can't only consider the present state.
Ironic isn't it. Google is a threat, but the media focuses on a random memo. Not dismissing the memo, but it pales in comparison to Google's larger scope.
Unfortunately, the outrage of people about some issue is usually inversely proportional to its importance. This seems to be a general fact about humans.
In the end it's your/our choice to choose Google for every single decision you've described. It's not like we can't do it without Google, we used to do fine doing the same things before Google. I think it's unsettling how many people choose to do almost everything using Google, Facebook, Amazon.
That's not really true at all. Almost everyone uses Google-controlled email addresses, so even if I don't, Google still gets our entire conversations. There's no option to avoid that except just refusing to email almost everyone.
You also don't really "choose" to give your data through Google Analytics. You can block it, but that's a lot different than choosing to give it in the first place. Even if you do block it, that's still only client-side and it's possible that the site is sending data through other methods that you can't control.
And like I mentioned in another comment already, what about sites that are hosted on GCP, sites that make requests to other sites that are hosted on GCP, Google network infrastructure, etc.?
You get a choice about some of it, but certainly nowhere near all of it.
If I could point to the flaw in both your and the article's arguments, it's trying to paint either as worse than the other.
Both are exceedingly bad. Both have proven exceedingly harmful (and, yes, useful, which is actually a reason why they're so perniciously harmful).
I never fell into Facebook's maw, though that's cost some inconvenience.
I've somewhat extracted myself from Google's, though still only partially:
DuckDuckGo for search. It's quite good, and I prefer bang search and actual, direct links rather than Google redirects. Though I still miss ranged date search.
OpenStreetMap for maps.
ProtonMail for email. It's not everything it could be, the client has some annoying limitations, and neither IMAPS nor POPS are supported. But at least it's not Gmail. There are other options as well.
My router blocks Google analytics, and a large set of other adtech hosts.
Despite being known as a critic of it, I use G+ heavily. With appropriate pruning and blocking, it's useful.
Yea, I have a lot less faith in the explicitly-unethical Facebook and its leadership than in Google, and that's been the case pretty much since Facebook came on the scene.
But how principled the founders are is only one part of the picture, and Google just has the potential to be a lot scarier. People change, companies outlive tight control by individual people, and explicitly-evil actors with armies force companies to do things or compromise their systems (this already happened to some degree a few years ago).
I don't really understand why HN goes on and on about how social media is inevitable and you're just a victim of its use. It's pretty easy to drop Facebook and pay a pretty trivial cost. Avoiding Google products, on the other hand, requires a sustained attempt in a dozen different product areas to use usually-inferior products. It's not impossible, but you pay a fairly hefty cost, to the point that most people don't bother. As you mention, they also have a lot finer grained data about what you actually do, as opposed to Facebook mostly knowing what you care to share.
I mean this without any intention to be rhetorical, but, how common is sending emails to plan an event? For anyone I meet in real life I either talk to them in real life, message them on discord, or call them on the phone. I've got nothing against email, I use it for a lot of things, but it's just too sluggish for event planning in my experience. Occasionally I might use facebook but that's for big consistent events like hosting a yearly get together because I live closest to a fairly big convention that happens in my city.
What exactly is scary in that scenario? So Google knows that you went somewhere and who your friends are. I don't see a problem.
The actually bad thing would be something like - you watch alt-right YouTube videos, and Google doesn't hire you because of that if you apply for a job. But even that isn't remotely close to the totalitarian government level of oppression, where you get executed for disagreeing with the party line.
Chances are, you are not important, and nobody cares where you go to eat and whoats with you.
The Nazis used highly in-depth Dutch census data during WW2 to hunt down and murder Jews and undsesirables in the country.
That data was considered harmless, even useful by the population to that point. Things changed, and that data became very useful to evil people.
This is why people in Germany and many eastern European countries are not sold on government surveillance for their own good, they lived under pervasive Soviet surveillance.
That kind of power can and likely will end up in the wrong hands eventually, so it is always best to keep it in check or just not have it at all.
What's scary is that they aren't aligned with your interests.
The actually bad thing is everybody acts like a) they are, and b) they can't and won't ever change.
Chances are, you are not important, and nobody is looking out to make sure they don't crush you.
In this scenario, you are the bug on the interstate which hits a car windshield. "Oh but the humans aren't out to get you, look at this big open space they made for us, what's so bad if the car knows where you are?".
As an example, just take a fairly normal life situation like going out for dinner with some friends, and think about how much of it goes "through" Google:
---
One of your friends sends an email to 6 others, to ask if everyone's free for dinner on Friday. 5 of the 7 people involved use gmail or a google apps address.
You've never heard of the restaurant they're suggesting, so you search for it on Google to see what kind of food it is.
You click to the restaurant's site. It uses Google Analytics, so even though you're no longer on Google, it still knows the exact path you take through the site while you're "outside".
You decide the restaurant looks good, and enter the dinner into Google Calendar.
On Friday, you use Google Maps to get to the restaurant, so Google knows exactly where you were before, what time you left, and the route you took. While you're driving, maybe you send a couple of text messages using the Google voice assistant.
At the restaurant, it turns out your friend Doug is there, even though he wasn't part of the emails. During dinner, you're all trying to remember the name of that movie where Shaq plays a genie, so both you and Doug grab your phones and google for phrases like "shaq movie genie" at about the same time. Even though Doug wasn't included in any of the planning, Google now knows that you're almost certainly together, and what you're talking about.
You finish your meal and pay via the restaurant's Square system, which emails the receipt to your gmail address. Google now knows exactly what you ate, and how much you paid for it.
You use Google Maps again when leaving, telling Google exactly how long you stayed at the restaurant and where you're going next.
---
I didn't even push that very far. There are multiple other things I could have easily added, and you can do this with almost any situation. It's quite insane how much Google knows about what people are doing all the time, and the level of detail they can get by combining these things.