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Comment by Albright | Hacker News Reader

Oh, come on. Just connect your Google router to your Google fiber connection and connect to it with your smartphone or laptop running a Google operating system and Google browser. Visit your Google home page (using Google's DNS servers, of course) to read your Google Mail, or perhaps catch up on the news with Google News, or use Google+ to see what your friends are up to, or get a little work done on Google Docs. Should you do some Google searches and end up on some non-Google sites, don't worry - you're still safe under the watchful eye of Google AdSense and Google Analytics. What have you got to be so paranoid about?

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Spot on.

I don't get it. It's become so obvious and people still seem to categorically refuse to admit the elephant in the room and to act upon it.

It's as if everybody was in some kind of unbreakable state of permanent cognitive paralysis.

And still, the HN crowd uses Gmail a lot. Here's the most technical crowd on the planet and people are obsessed with Gmail as if it was impossible to get email to work by any other means.

Furthermore, I will never understand why people would use Gmail, if there's IMAP and hundreds of email clients to choose from.

Same is true for Google Reader, that apparently caused a lot of buzz when it went away. Never understood this.

The only Google product I use is Google Maps, and Google Search occasionally. Replaced the latter with DuckDuckGo mostly and works well most of the time.

I only use Google maps for public transport route planning, otherwise I use openstreetmap. And osmand on Android is freaking awesome.

Is the search as good or as fast at gmail on these IMAP clients? I used the mail app for iPhone for a while and it sure isn't.

I use Mail on OS X and it is good enough for my purpose. Could certainly be a bit more sophisticated, but most of the time, it works. I like to have a real email client for my mails and not use a web app.

There might be dedicated search engines for emails though, if search is very important.

See, if you use search a lot and Google has the superior product for your use case, that's totally fine. But I guess most people use Gmail out of habit and not because it is truly superior to other email clients.

I'm with you here - I also find OS X's Mail plenty "good enough," including for search. And it works great for connecting to Google Mail accounts via IMAP…

Searching is a solved problem if you use OfflineIMAP to mirror your mail store locally, then run mu or notmuch on top of it. Honestly, it's faster for me to search my local mail store than using some web interface. Plus, i can do it in the train when i have no internet connection. I happily pay a few euros a month for an email server which provides me with IMAP.

Agreed. Even if Gmail is superior in some regards (I don't know - is it? There must be a reason so many people use it), as a tech savvy person I consider it a matter of pride (and privacy of course) to run my own mailserver with project like Sovereign https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

I have been thinking of doing this for a while. Thanks for sharing https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign. Is that all one needs (whatever if mentioned on the README)?

I would be worried about getting marked as a spam server.

And this is exactly the reason I use Gmail.

This is a common belief but it hasn't been an issue in my experience of running my email server (with Sovereign) for the last two years. I run about a dozen email addresses over a handful of domains for myself and some friends and colleagues.

Sovereign includes instructions/configuration to run an upstanding email server citizen, including SPL, TKIP, MTA encryption, etc. Remote mail servers seem to respect it at least as much as gmail.

It also runs a rbl-check script once a day to notify you if your IP ends up on a blacklist. In two years running on both DigitalOcean, I've had no issues. Even gmail routinely gets added to RBLs from time to time.

I would gladly use email client with IMAP server but desktop mail clients are really still in the 90ties.

Do you have a good to alternative Gmail/Inbox which has Inbox like archiving, and easy cleanup of the ... inbox, hiding emails for some period of time, pinning emails?

As for the hosting of emails (assuming I don't want to have 10GB dedicated to emails on my machine), do you have anything that gives me 10GB of mail and has the ease of use of Inbox on all the devices (desktop and mobile)?

And still, the HN crowd uses Gmail a lot.

Ditching GMail changes nothing about your privacy situation.

An E-Mail is a postcard. Sending a postcard via DHL instead of USPS doesn't make it any more confidential, even if you happen to be the owner of DHL.

You're not wrong, but you're not right either.

Disregarding the (slow) advancements of E-Mail encryption (DANE), and the fact that's desireable that no one company has your data. The big point is that it's fair to assume that everybody has access to your mails while in transit, but using gmail Google has access to all your mails at rest.

There is no point worrying about your e-mail "at rest" when everyone has already seen it in transit.

"Ditching GMail changes nothing about your privacy situation."

Actually, there is quite a bit to be gained by running your own mail server - especially in relation to other people on your mail server.

For instance, everyone at rsync.net logs into (al)pine over SSH. So yes, if you email rsync.net and we converse, that is like the postcard - every hop it goes through can see it.

But no piece of internal rsync.net email has ever traversed a network of any kind. Internal rsync.net emails are just local copy operations from one mailspool to another.

The same could be true of your company ... or your family.

> The only Google product I use is Google Maps

I tried Bing Maps the other day and was surprised how much more usable it is. It loads faster, moves faster, and actually has a nicer interface because it uses semitransparent text to show names of areas.

How do you propose the common person act upon it?

Don't get a Google Router. Okay.

Don't use Google Fiber. Well, shucks - there's not a lot of 1,000 megabit ISPs in my area.

Don't use a Chromebook. Okay. What virus scanner should I install, then? And where should I store my data for backup? And didn't we hear that Microsoft tried to have Windows 10 phone home every damn keystroke or something?

Google browser. Fair enough, Firefox is decent.

Google DNS. Fair enough, unless I have Google Fiber. Then it's kinda weird to not pair them.

Google Mail. Something that looks like GMail has all of the problems of Google Mail. Is Microsoft really a better solution in your mind?

Google News. Come now, the problem of monopoly in news existed long before Google News did. I'd rather people also use Google News than JUST CNN, MSNBC, or shudder, the other one.

Google+. Right, because Facebook is so much better at respecting users.

Google Docs. Again, is Microsoft really better? Or Microsoft + Dropbox?

Google Search. What, I should use Bing?

AdSense and Analytics. Not really my choice, is it?

I genuinely ask this question. What do you think the common person could or should do, that would be better for them?

What, the Apple computer, Apple router, Apple browser, Apple Mail, and Siri?

Firefox may be a decent browser, but unfortunatly Mozilla has given in when it comes to adopting data kraken integration and has embedded software that can make Firefox en par with Chrome et al in the future.

No more good guys, I am afraid. Mozilla profited greatly from being spread by hackers initially, but now they no longer qualify for being supported.

No source here, I am on a crappy notebook, on the move.

At least by using a non-Google "free" mail service, file storage service, etc, you're distributing your mineable information among competing companies instead of handing it all over to a single entity. Or, you can do as I do and just find a reputable service you can just pay and not worry about it. (I pay Zoho $24 a year to host my mail.)

> What, the Apple computer, Apple router, Apple browser, Apple Mail, and Siri?

The difference between Apple's services and Google's equivalents is that Apple makes its money by selling you the boxes that the services run on - it doesn't directly profit on the services themselves. For Google, the service is the product, so if they can't make you pay for the service, then it has all incentive to data mine it for profit.

I fail to see how copying my data to more companies reduces my attack surface.

> all incentive to data mine it for profit.

Yes, and it has all incentive to protect my privacy, because if they screw that up, they lose all of my business, and all of everyone else's business, too.

> I fail to see how copying my data to more companies reduces my attack surface.

I'm talking about your privacy and mine-ability, not your attack surface. (Though it does help with that too, in a way - a bigger chance someone will get some of your data, perhaps, but a smaller chance they'll get all of it.)

No. That does not help minimize my attack surface. You're confusing surface with depth. And unfortunately, someone doesn't need to steal very much of my data in order to screw me over royally. If my Social Security number is held by more companies, that does not help me.

>Yes, and it has all incentive to protect my privacy, because if they screw that up, they lose all of my business, and all of everyone else's business, too.

There have been innumerable data breaches and we haven't seen those companies go bankrupt.

I pay attention to the data breaches. Google is one of the best companies out there.

I agree. My point still stands. The industry as a whole is terrible at keeping data secure.

> Don't {...}

You have pointed out many of the reasons why this is indeed a hard problem. That's why some of us have been trying to warn about these dangers for almost 20 years. The problem was significantly easier to fight 10 (or even 5) years ago, but everybody - including the technically knowledgeable people that should have known better - decided that shiny features were more important than paying attention to the larger picture and defending their future freedom.

> What do you think the common person could or should do, that would be better for them?

They should not use any service that goes against their long-term interests. While having a replacement is nice, this might require making a sacrifice. The lack of an alternative doesn't justify supporting the bad option[1].

Do you think that this problem is going to get any easier as time goes on? The cost of leaving Google is only going to increase, so it might be a good idea to find a way to pay that cost sooner rather than later.

[1] "...we've proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane." ( http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html )

Just finished reading 'The Circle' by Dave Eggers - think Google's monopoly and totalitarianism come true - and this just further reiterates how Google are become so pervasive and invasive in monetising off everyone's data and lack of privacy awareness.

I'll go back to dial-up rather than have all my activity centralised in the Google ether.

The NSA should stop the charade and just buy Google and Facebook already. They already have us by the balls, lets at least make it official and make the world embrace the heroic and always rightful eye of the US government.

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