We don't need Google | Hacker News Reader

We don't need Google

jacoduplessis.co.za

43 pointsnewsat1360 comments

I hate this statement " I don't want Google to sell my data so that they can blow the money on half-baked Google X projects"

Someone please tell me how can I buy your data and who exactly is google selling my personal data to ?

Also google x projects have moved the needle in VR / AR, self driving cars, and in some cities fiber has made a difference. Really I don't get why we'd want to not fund this stuff.

It's my hunch that having immense data on all humans in one place, along with the potential to take programmatic action based on that data, may significantly increase the risk of massive, harmful affects on society on the decade to century scale.

This may involve governments or other powerful entities co-opting the data, which there are increasing hints of. It doesn't even have to be some kind of catastrophy. One scenario I imagine would be something mundane like preventing an alternate future where the majority of people are twice as happy and have twice as much autonomy.

Obviously, this can't be proven. But this hunch gives me great pause.

>It's my hunch that having immense data on all humans in one place, along with the potential to take programmatic action based on that data

If you understand the Prism program the govt doesn't even need to go to individual companies. They hook directly into the ISP.

> Someone please tell me how can I buy your data and who exactly is google selling my personal data to ?

You can't. Google aren't selling your personal data to anyone. That's antithetical to their business model, which involves them having all the data.

They are selling your eyeballs to advertisers, and using your personal data to enable advertisers to very precisely target the demographics they think want to see their adverts. Not that this works.

Of course you don't strictly need Google. You can live without it.

But will the quality of your internet life be the same? Good luck with alternative search engines result quality.

And the price? Just the email provider you suggest will cost you $48 a year - vs $0 for Google.

Would you like to pay? Fine. The whole point is that Google, in order to provide all those services without paying, actually asks something from you - your data. Just like Facebook and Twitter. Consider G Suite as well, since its privacy guarantees are different from free gmail accounts.

I started using DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Initially, I would find myself using Google at least a few times a day if DDG didn't turn up what I was looking for.

As time went on this was less and less the case, and now I hardly ever use Google for web search. DDG results are a lot better than they used to be and almost always as good as Google in my experience.

I've also had this experience with DDG. Other people I've turned on to DDG have also experienced this.

I can't tell whether their search algorithms have gotten better or I've gotten used to DDG results.

This also depends on what you're searching for. If you're hunting for a lot of academic stuff from journals, DDG just isn't good enough. On top of that its agonizingly slow. I try to give it a chance everywhere: phone, office workstation, home laptop. It's just not enough.

"But will the quality of your internet life be the same?"

Initially? Probably not.

But given enough time, I think dependence upon Google and continued contributions of ones personal details will be a major detriment.

There is no free lunch.

How will it be a major detriment? You can't just say something like that and expect people to understand what you mean.

I switched to DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, and it really does just fine. Besides, if DDG's results aren't good enough, you can just add !g to your query string and search again - this time DDG will act as a frontend for Google search. I used to do this frequently but DDG's results have improved steadily while I've been using it and now I rarely bother.

Or !sp which sends your result to startpage which is a proxy for Google.

> But will the quality of your internet life be the same?

The same? No. But, that's the point: Whether life gets better or worse is an empirical question, which means that it can be answered experimentally.

As for the cost of the experiment, consider that $50 is less than what many of us spend on renewing dormant domain names each year.

I do lots of road trips to places I've never been, and I can't imagine doing it without Google Map. No idea how people in the past did it. For me personally, I could maybe do without other Google services, but without Google Map? Forget it. Actually, Google Search seems irreplaceable either.

I do lots of road trips to places I've never been, and I can't imagine doing it without Google Map.

You've never heard of Bing Maps, or OpenStreetMap?

Aside from the fact that before 2005 or so, people used to travel to all kinds of fascinating, exotic places around the world with maps made of... get this... paper.

Or a map?

The search function on Google Map is really handy for when I need to find food and stuff. And offline maps for when I need to go places with sporadic internet is awesome as well.

I know I know, you can actually travel with a paper map. But I'm spoiled, as are most people these days I'm sure. So without a phone app is just too much of a decrease in life quality.

Or you could lift your eyes from your bloody phone for a minute while you walk and see that there are signs on or above store fronts which say "grocery" or something like that...

Try doing that when the stuff you need to find is at least 100 miles away.

One very seldom "needs to" pinpoint the location of something in a far-off city before one gets to the general area first. Which is what one used to do when traveling (i.e. at the first gas or train station in the general area, depending on the mode of travel, you get your coffee, your would get your donut/baguette/whatever... and a map of whatever fancy new city you've just arrived in).

Sure. being able to do this online, for any place in the world, within seconds is a huge convenience... but ultimately just that -- a convenience.

Sure, and people used to get around with horses and buggies. But it's not much of an exaggeration to say that for a lot of people in a lot of places, life without the internal combustion engine isn't feasible.

Pointing out that people used to use an inferior tool to do the same thing less effectively is kind of a dumb response to someone mentioning how critical a tool is.

No real disagreement with the Bing/OSM recommendations tho

People knee-jerkingly say they "can't imagine" living without modern conveniences -- their cars, TV, Skype, online takeout or grocery delivery -- all the time. Another interpretation is that they've grown complacent, and are arguably addicted to some of these conveniences. Which is exactly the state of conditioning that the companies offering these services would like them to be in.

Either way -- even though online maps are definitely a boon, something about the idea that one "can't imagine" the world before 2005 (that is, before Google Maps) just doesn't quite add up.

Using a map is not inferior. Quite the opposite. Once thing I noticed with most people who use GPS directions is that they have no idea where they are, no idea of their environment.

When you use a map, you see the geography of the territory as a whole. You know if you go North or North-West, you know what is located near your itinerary and your destination, you know the different possibles ways, which ones are more direct or straight, which ones are longer but less steep and winding (and you know why: because of some geographical obstacle that you will later remember as a landmark as you walk/drive by it), you have a general idea how to recover if you take a wrong direction at some point or if for some reason you have to change your route.

These are quite many points for which the real map is superior.

And please: there is no "critical" tool there.

I really agree with this and encourage others to try a few trips without it.

About 4 years ago, I gave up primarily using GPS guidance because I missed using my brain and I enjoy learning about new areas (georgraphy and topology) and routes. The added bonus of learning this stuff is that it makes the return trip or any future journeys even more enjoyable and totally effortless.

Getting lost can be a great opportunity to interact with local person. Aside from getting directions, it's a chance to make a new friend and potentially find out about interesting activities or sites to see in the local area.

Google maps (and similar products) can honestly be a clunky and frustrating experience for walking or cycling directions in big cities, the acuracy provided by GPS just isn't available if the signal is weak or moving through underground thoroughfares, it's terrible. When arriving in a new and exciting city, there is nothing worse than shutting it out by spending time staring at a phone. Studying an area before arriving solves this problem and interacting with locals often has major benefits. Plus you look like less of a vulnerable tourist.

Another thing worth mentioning is edge cases, road works, detours etc can really screw the un-prepared. While travelling in semi-remote areas, I've seen Google maps do some really strange stuff, instructing me to turn around and go somewhere else etc, In this situation, one rarely will have network coverage to help out. So being prepared is an advantage.

Sure, we're lucky to have the luxury of being able to pull up a map of pretty much anywhere on a tiny computer, but like most things, GPS guidance can be abused.

Let's not fotget to use our brains, those things are awesome!

You sound like my grandfather.

Using the mail is not inferior. Quote the opposite. One thing I noticed with most people who use the internet is they have no idea of their environment.

When you use the mail, you get a better understanding of how information travels. You see stamps, feel the paper, get hand cramps when you write too much. You see which post office a letter came from.

These are quite many points for which the real mail is superior.

And please: there is no"critical" tool there.

This is one of the generation gap thing. Kinda like knowing how to install Windows 95 OS on a machine, you need to run all sorts of command line utilities before you can actually perform the installation, and you have to go out and get the drivers manually, and sometimes you have to use your floppy disk to install the CD rom driver so you can install the network driver from the CD, then select the right .ini file in the driver folder that matches your CD readers spec. People used to know how to do all of that, but nowadays?

I think we'll probably have a generation of drivers who will simply not know what to do and would probably get lost easily if their phone breaks/data-plan runs out.

With any luck, that won't be an issue for a long time considering self-driving cars are on their way.

I can very much recommend maps.me as a google maps replacement on mobile.

> No idea how people in the past did it

With paper maps. They are pretty easy to use and don't run out of batteries, work offline. Problems: no zoom and you must know where you are. The upside is that after all those years of training I tend to know where I am and I can afford not to enable location services on my phone. I open Google Maps and zoom to my position.

Google Search works in a browser without being logged into Google. No app needed.

Paper maps and a bit of awareness of your surroundings will get you a long way.

I'm actually a touch annoyed with some of the online maps for the lack of the right details. With a highway number and mile marker, I can pinpoint my position on a paper map. Can't do that with Google maps.

How about Open Street Map? http://osmand.net

It's not perfect, but it provides a good base of functionality, and gets you to big tour destinations. It will also get you to most restaurants in a big city, but it doesn't have hours of operation or star ratings, so it's less useful in that regard.

I wish there were more alternatives to Google Maps though. You're absolutely right that it feels indispensable to most people these days...

That one is unusable to me. I nearly throw my phone in frustration just trying to enter the destination. Region, City, Street, Building... wtf? Not only backwards, but four fields. Can't even search by destinations, like "Pi-hi cafe". You can enter fields, which never even works, or stick a pin on the map. It makes me furious just thinking about how awful it is.

The new version of the Osmand~ Android app introduced free-form text searching.

It's a lot better, but still not good.

Google Maps actually feels unusable to me these days, not indispensible! I don't know what Google was trying to accomplish with their last UI rework, but I can't stand using it anymore. I actually switched to Bing maps, because it was stupider, less helpful, and therefore more likely to give me the information I'm looking for.

Obviously travel was possible before Google. I'd go as far as saying that travel was actually more enjoyable back then: the unknown, the exploration, the spontaneity.

Today's travel consists of entering an address, getting your algorithm, following the steps, taking a celebratory photo. Then you simply head home.

I vehemently disagree. This misty eyed myth of slow-life travel in the good ol' days with much exploring the unknown is balderdash. At least to the extent that google maps somehow precludes one from being able to do it nowadays.

I remember those glory days before Google maps. When I was a kid, and we had to drive to someone's house as a family, we'd pray that dad knew where we were going. If not, it was a minefield of stress and frustration as we'd try to fathom the vague instructions given to us by the host, and navigate around a city with poor signage.

We'd all arrive half an hour late, flustered, angry at each other, and in no mood to enjoy ourselves. Fuck those times.

I have recently given up Google and most of it's products. And I find some of the things on this list are not relevant for the average person. Here is my personal list:

Google Search (DuckDuckGo) Gmail (ProtonMail) YouTube (There's pretty much nothing because of the networking effect YouTube has. But, if you just want something to share videos, there's Media Goblin) Google Drive (NextCloud) Google Keep (Wallabag/Pocket) Google Maps (OpenStreetMap) Google Calendar & Contacts (NextCloud) Google Docs (LibreOffice Online)

Thanks for the list. Are you running this on a single server and install them manually? How hard do you think this is for the average (somewhat technical) person?

Sorry for the late response. Nextcloud is super easy to install. It is as simple as extracting the zip file in your web server directory.

You don't need more hardware to run it either. I have mine running on a raspberry pi 3.

If someone is interested in kicking Google out of their life, I can recommend reading about how Bryan Lunduke embarked on that mission. He wrote a series of articles in 2015, here are direct links to them:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2940176/opensource-subne...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2940569/opensource-subne...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2941717/opensource-subne...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2942161/opensource-subne...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2946696/opensource-subne...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2949819/opensource-subne...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2971168/linux/kicking-go...

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2977884/opensource-subne...

Some of these services are roughly interchangeable with competitors; others, not so much.

Vimeo, for example, has nowhere near the (truly insane) variety and depth of YT, content-wise (such that it doesn't even try to compete with them, on that level). If you think you can decide to just "never open a YouTube video, ever"... you're just not going to see a lot of stuff that's happening in the world.

Similarly with Google Docs. Its viability has very little to do with the simple feature of it being a cloud-editable word-like doc -- but rather the fact that it's easily sharable (or "easily enough", provided you have a Google Doc). It's incredibly popular for a whole lot of basic collaboration tasks. If you think you can boycott it... you're just not going to be able to collaborate with a whole lot of people.

Network effects (and in particular, lock-in) are very real. Even though you may not like them very much, pretending that you can just make them go away (by using lesser-known alternatives) just isn't going to work.

Why was this flagged? It seems relevant to many here and reasonably written.

Yeah, I don't get why this was flagged. I posted the article. It does a good job pointing out alternatives.

Good question. Seems like people aren't using the flag function responsibly. I would like more transparency on this as well.

It would be cool if the mods would add a required text box for stating the reason something is flagged. HN just makes it too easy to flag something you disagree with.

I also don't like how Google makes all this money from advertising and then dumps into their poorly done Google-X projects. That money would be better off spent in the free market it seems.

What is it about Google X that doesn't really lend to either real product development, or even cool tech (of late?). For the amount of money they put into it, I expect a lot more output.

At their core they are still a big company and attract the kinds of people who want to work for a big company. Usually, this at direct odds to people who seek out the startup environment. There are some notable exceptions but the basic premise generally holds true.

> That money would be better off spent in the free market it

What does that mean? Would we all have been better off if Bell Labs hadn't gone off on tangents? Even if Google do it poorly why would you care?

Say what? Maps, Android, one of the best Spam filters anywhere, the best search engine, the best image search engine, Youtube, one of the best web browsers...

Much of this isn't "pure" Google development, yes. And god knows Google has woeful privacy policies (personally, I use StartPage, and try to use Google services as little as I can) but to think of them as serial-money-wasters is a bit rich.

Also, that needless, typical HN, "big companies bad, startups good, free markets GOAT" bit at the end is really wearisome.

Please provide some evidence that the majority of Google X projects are "poorly done."

Self-driving cars -> Not only has it become its own company (Waymo) but it also motivated many other companies to tackle the same problem and develop self-driving tech of its own.

Life Sciences, Google Contact Lenses -> Now its own company, Verily.

Google Brain -> I quote Astro Teller "It would be fair to say Google Brain (now called the Neural Network Project) is producing in value for Google something that would be comparable to the total costs of Google X — just that one thing we’ve spun out." https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/googles-captain-of...

Hard science and engineering problems take non-trivial amounts of resources to solve. How many start-ups are tackling the kinds of problems that X is trying to solve?

I use Android and I'm not interested in messing around with custom ROMs. This really chains me to having a google account unfortunately. I really wish the Firefox phone had worked out. Maybe the Ubuntu phone will succeed there.

You don't have to use that account for anything except Google Play. I use Maps and YouTube without being logged in, no GMail. I use Drive for the customers that use it. I don't use Google Now. I do use Google as search engine but in the browser, either Firefox or Opera.

Is it possible to use your phone's GPS without sending all data to Google (i.e. enable GPS without also enabling Google Location Services)?

I think it depends on the app. I wrote an app that read from the GPS sensor and sent the position to a server of mine. Google didn't get any data. However if you want to use other sources to get a more precise position (example: wifi access points) I think that Google must know.

Not that Google definitely won't decide to shut down their services (I still remember you, Google Reader!), but I'm extremely hesitant to commit to some alternate services. I've been burned so many times when thinking "ah, what a great service!" and then it vanishes after I've grown used to it an can't imagine my life without it. I'd much rather move to self-hosted for as much as possible. But then that leads to the bother of installing and maintaining things. And then I'm back to being lazy and sticking with Google services. It's my eternal cycle.

Would be an interesting project to follow. An even more interesting journey would be to document the entire process and only use/make open source products as a replacement of each Google product.

There are, already.

The problem is: how do you make an open source version of YouTube, or even replace it with Vimeo? People publish their stuff to YouTube, you can't force them to use Vimeo...

check the French non-profit Framasoft with "degooglisons internet": https://degooglisons-internet.org/

Are any of you familiar with an open source/libre app for public transit routing information that'd replace Google Maps?

OsmAnd~ for Android; it's.. okay.

If your local transit agencies are supported (or you're able to add them to the upstream library they use to collect this data), Transportr seems like a good choice: https://transportr.grobox.de/

Sadly, it doesn't cover any of the agencies in the Bay area, so I've had to rely on Transit (transitapp.com) from the Play Store.

I just finished most of this transition for my own purposes, with the main difference that I decided to self-host most of the services I was previously using Google for. Some highlights:

* Android: if you really want to divest yourself from Google, Android is going to be a showstopper for any but the most committed people. I'm running LineageOS (nee CyanogenMod) without gapps, using microG as a collection of play services API replacements. While that keeps me from adding a google account to the phone (which is the main thing I'm trying to avoid), I still end up needing something like Yalp Store (available from F-Droid) to download and update Play Store apps, because there are a few I actually can't get by without a huge level of inconvenience. I did all this because I enjoyed the challenge of it; for normal people who aren't intrinsically motivated by this stuff, I suggest buying an iPhone and saving yourself the headache. Seriously.

* Email was the easiest thing to move, and the hardest to get right. I remember when I originally moved my email to Gmail, and noted a marked increase in spam; the same thing happened when I moved off of Gmail last month. A combination of postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, and a lot of tweaking has me mostly back to the point where I was when I was with Google. I've been using Rainloop for a use-anywhere web UI, although I've used Roundcube in the past and was pretty happy with it. On mobile, I'm actually using k9mail, despite how dated it is, because it actually gets IMAP right; both the stock "Email" app and Gmail had sporadic issues with IMAP that I got tired of dealing with.

* Meanwhile, calendaring was the messiest part of the move, mostly because CalDAV is a bit of a mess, and both client and server implementations leave a lot to be desired. I ended up using sabre/dav on the backend because I could tweak and extend it quite a but to do what I need, and because it had baked-in support for CalDAV scheduling, which is something I can't really live without. I'm using DAVdroid on Android for both calendar and contact sync, which is great except for scheduling, which I can't really use. (A combination of what looks to be some misbehavior in davdroid, and android limitations in the calendar API.)

* More calendaring: are you used to having your calendar invites just magically show up in your calendar? Yeah, that's probably not going to work anymore. I'm been writing an itip milter that scans for text/calendar mime parts in incoming email and shoves them in an appropriate caldav store, but it's going to be pretty hacky even if I finish it. ;) If you're looking for better integration here, look at something like Zimbra; it's a huge pain in the ass to run, and it's resource-heavy, but when it's running well it's amazingly polished from the end user's perspective. Or give FastMail some money, because they've been doing this for a long time, and do it really well.

* Docs, photos, file syncing in general: There's a bunch of options here. I almost ended running an instance of NextCloud (nee OwnCloud) for this, because it would cover a few different use cases (document storage, photos, calendaring, contacts, etc), but settled on Syncthing as a general file synchronization tool. I'm hosting a cloud instance that my laptop, mobile devices, etc. can all talk to, as well as an instance on a machine at home, giving me pretty good coverage for on-demand backups. I try to avoid working in heavyweight document formats for personal stuff (markdown and a text editor works for my use case most of the time); for things I have to share or where I need more powerful tools, LibreOffice. I don't have a good photo management solution right now beyond "directory full of photos synced from my phone and camera".

* Books: I had bought a bunch of books on the Play Store. This was a painful lesson in how bad the state of DRM in ebooks is, especially if you don't have a Windows machine lying around. I ended up having to install Adobe Digital Editions under Wine, then used a Calibre plugin to automatically convert DRM'd ebooks via ADE when I have it import them. I share the Calibre collection to my tablet via syncthing, so changes, read positions, etc. sync nicely. (I don't mean to pick on Google on this one; the DRM issue seems to be a mess with every bookseller right now.)

* Music: Exported my music using Music Manager, sync with Syncthing, and access streaming music with Spotify. Done, easy.

* Maps: I use Google Maps, logged out (it's one of the few Google apps that continues to function properly even without a Google account on the device). OsmAnd~ is a great idea, and I use it as a fallback when I'm outside of cell coverage, but I find it almost impossible to use in a day-to-day context (if you have it open gmaps links/intents, it almost never figures out the address I'm looking for, and I've had terrible luck relying on it for navigation). Note that without logging in, you cannot save Google Maps data offline, because apparently gmaps engineers are a little bit spiteful.

* Search: I've defaulted to DuckDuckGo for years. Yes, sometimes I hit "!g" to search Google, but I don't default to them, and haven't for a long time. Also, shock of shocks, bing is getting pretty good.

* Android Pay: I opted out. I have credit and debit cards, and I have cash. Some people might find this to be a deal breaker, I find it hasn't changed my life in any significant way.

* Browsing: Firefox. Not really a change for me.

There's a bunch of smaller one-off services that I've used over time, but those are the big ones from a personal perspective. For some folks, a large chunk of these can be handled by running an instance of NextCloud, and you'll get a polished, fairly integrated experience for the parts they can cover.

At some point, I should probably write this up with more details about the tradeoffs I made with each piece.

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