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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I for one, will never use a Google product again. They level of creepiness and data they have on all their users is insane.

I personally have switched to DuckDuckGo, Fastmail, FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw), and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented. Smooth sailing.

The problem with Google, is they are building a repository for themselves, but also for government. Couple that with their willingness to kill products, and you'd have to be insane to trust their services.

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> and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented

One alternative that's been around for a while you might like if you want to continue using smart mobile devices is an operating system made by Apple (not Google), called iOS (used to be called iPhone OS but it can now be used on tablets too even some music players like iPods have it).

Just throwing that out there, they have a lot of similar features, but with iOS you don't need to get involved with Google. Check it out, it's definitely a viable alternative.

Is this sarcasm? (honest question)

I suppose it is, taking into account the GP said there's no "viable alternative" to Android... but iOS exists, and it's not only a viable alternative, but much better than Android in lots of ways.

>>it's not only a viable alternative, but much better than Android in lots of ways.<<

That is kind of a matter of individual taste. Many people are on the other side, and by the look of it, OP too. He/She is on android.

Viable doesn't mean "subjectively better"

He wasn't referring to the "viable" portion. He was commenting on: "[...] but much better than Android in lots of ways."

Indeed, saying something like "much better" is indeed subjective as we don't all agree to it and it's not based on objective facts.

The GP said they "will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented." This strongly implies iOS is not a viable alternative generally, rather than for them specifically. It read like a cheap potshot at iOS.

I read it more as deadpan comedy.

I think it's safe to assume lettergram is aware of iOS, has considered it, and has decided it's not a viable alternative for their needs.

I think it's also safe to assume the comment you're replying to is absolutely drenched in sarcasm

The OP seems concerned about privacy. Apple certainly has a lot of PR activity promoting privacy of their products.

But at the same time it seems so many websites, apps, companies, ISPs, etc. are hoping to track their users much more than before. Perhaps even sell profiles on their users to advertisers or other tech companies.

Apple also seems to be a fairly secretive company. Their products have historically felt more "closed" than Android. Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android? And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?

Apple takes your money up front so they don't need to violate user privacy for business reasons.

Apple also sucks at using user data to make better products compared to Google, so it's perfect for them to claim concern for privacy as a business strategy.

Refusing to do something isn't the same as being bad at doing something.

Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

The OP can upgrade from iOS whenever the appropriately Free/Libre mobile operating system is viable.

iOS, despite being a very closed ecosystem, is much more privacy-conscious. In addition to being much more resistant to law enforcement and criminal adversaries, it submits far less information about the user to Apple by default.

To be fair to the Android team, almost all of the user tracking and advertisement targeting can be disabled in the system and account preferences. Sure, Google could disregard the user preferences, but that might open up liability for fraud.

> Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android?

Doesn't seem that way. Consider the flak Apple took for standing up for users' rights with the whole Bernardino incident.

And here's a specific example I read about a while ago. When you're using Google Maps, your device is directly identifiable in Google's servers all the time by a unique identification token. When using Apple Maps, your iPhone generates a new token every ~15 minutes and uses that to report position. There is no connection between any two tokens other than location proximity, making it much more difficult to track users directly from Apple's end. (I'd give a source but I'm on mobile, but I think I read about it on Apple's website around a year ago.)

> And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?

Well, if their business was selling customer data then yeah. But their business is selling cool devices with cool software. Yes, collecting all that data would make some things a lot easier — ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people? — but Apple appears to care about privacy and security enough that they don't engage in these tactics. And... they seem to be doing okay despite it, so I don't think they mind the hit to their piggy banks.

>ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people?

You have some valid points on your post, but praising the inferiority of software based on perceived limitations of increased security focus seems like Apple cult-of-personality type stuff.

I'm not sure I exactly follow, but anyway it's easy to find comments online from people who've worked at Apple recently who talk about how this is actually a logistical problem. Apple can't just throw data at their issues until things work like e.g. Google can, specifically because they do not collect as much data in the first place.

> as much

Ah, so they're the privacy option because they only collect a lot of data, not gobs and gobs of data?

Yes?

You can disable Siri if you want.

You don't need to use location-based software.

Basically everything on an iPhone that collects data doesn't need to be used, and when it does collect data it's because it is usually needed.

They're the privacy option because the data they collect is heavily restricted. Consider my earlier example of the navigation identification tokens — Apple has a similar "amount" of data, but it's significantly less useful in its raw form than Google's. But Apple makes the choice to collect data in that way because it helps protect users' privacy.

It's an established fact that Apple has traditionally refused to just use all of their user recordings as training data, and is willing to accept worse voice recognition as a result.

Thats not what they claim.

>We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/

iOS is better for privacy (Apple is more inept at cloud stuff than Google) but much, much worse for freedom. I don't want a device that I'll have to get Apple's permission to install stuff on.

Right now, which do you value more?

It's entirely possible that, in the near future, a competitor will show up that won't make you choose between the two. However, that time is not now.

Lineage without GApps gives you both, at the cost of some convenience.

Without GApps / Play Services, I'm wondering just how helpful an Android device would be for the typical techy on the go.

Sure, I could text, check email, use open source maps, check my account balances, and play some simple games.

But I've learned both from my BlackBerry which had Android emulation and Kindle Tablet, both of which can't use apps that depend on Google's APIs, a lot of pretty important apps won't work: any maps that show traffic or turn by turn directions, Uber / Lyft, almost all popular social apps like Twitter, Facebook, most popular games, payment apps, dating apps, streaming music, etc.

That's a big loss. Not sure I want to go back to the days of my old Nokia smart phone with Symbian apps or even BlackBerry QNX which had a decent browser.

Freedom, that's why I run Android. I have the freedom of disabling the tracking.

I second this. It's definitely a niche product from a little known indie developer, but iOS is definitely worth using in my books.

They seem to have pretty good design chops as well ;)

The only sad things I use more Google products on my iPhone than Apple ones, notably Google Photos and Chrome. I'd never switch though as I have never had a pleasant experience using Android.

It is certainly annoying with how they try and nudge other products away in subtle ways. Like like Firefox on Android, works really well. However on Google's search, they give you a stripped down version of their search results inferior to what Chrome gets.

Use an addon like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-...

And you find out that Firefox has no problem rendering the full featured chrome version.

I assume the only reason they do it is so that Firefox for Android users feel slightly inconvenienced enough to remain Chrome users.

Curious, I find the left version preferable. More compact, and probably faster to load too.

It's similar speeds though I've got 4G or good Wifi. But what you miss out on is the top cards. Like if you search for Weather, you can see what's the predicted forecast per hour. Or when you search for translate, you get a translate widget at the top.

And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.

Is it possible they rolled out a "Chrome" and an "everyone else" option since some options like cards are only tested by Google on Chrome, and that's why it shows up as such?

Just applying Hanlon's razor here.

Well they give the chrome site to Safari on iPhone OS. So possibly but this is the company that is all about web standards, right? At least I'm sure that what someone working on Chromium/Chrome/Angular/etc would say.

Safari and Chrome are using the same basic webkit rendering engine with minimal mutations from each other.

Firefox's engine is different and makes many different decisions with regards to implementation detail. Since the web standards rarely constrain things like, say, time to complete a reflow step in mutating a page when a DOM element has its visibility property changed, standards-compliant browsers can make different decisions on these bits of detail that lead to practically very different experiences.

In general, if it works on Chrome it'll probably work on Safari, and it is not guaranteed to work on Firefox, IE, or Edge without further testing.

However, I do think you'd be hard pressed to claim that Google does not have the resources to test and make sure that it does work on mobile Firefox.

Heh. I trust them less and less:

Obvious problems goes unnoticed: search results page kept burning cpu if I keet it open in desktop Firefox. (Installed an extension to fix it and haven't tested lately.)

It's hard to belive this can happen without anyone caring at such a big place.

At a company that seems to be attracting the best and brightest it is really hard to belive this isn't intentional.

Then again I've been equally wrong before.

So now assume they test and find it doesn't work on mobile Firefox. What should they do? Refrain from rolling out the design to Chrome and Safari until Firefox performance catches up, or roll out the functionality differently on different browsers?

Sounds like, based on the descriptions here, they're doing the latter, right? Infinite scrolling on Chrome vs. paged viewing on Firefox, for instance.

They’ve now had 4 years. 4 goddamn years to update the Firefox version, and they’ve just removed features instead.

That sounds like it was unworkable in Firefox.

Maybe FF just isn't a very good browser? You can be standards-compliant while implementing the standards with performance problems and ugly corner-cases.

It works in Firefox. Always has. Change the UA, and it just works.

This is the same story as when Google made Inbox a "Chrome-Exclusive" that also didn’t run in Safari, Opera, or even fucking Chromium.

It’s just anticompetitiveness.

> It’s just anticompetitiveness.

I find it interesting how a word's proper usage is in a case that it's opposite would work better!

Anticompetitive is the right word in your sentence, of course, but google isn't anti-competitive in this case with firefox. It is ultra-competitive!

"So now assume they test and find it doesn't work on mobile Firefox. What should they do?"

Fix it, just like any other website out there.

(My annoyed opinion.)

I say they are applying an Microsoft vs Opera here and I wish EU will take a closer look at them soon.

IMO basic cross-browser compability is something that everyone but the most cash-strapped or pre-beta software should apply for as long as it is publicly available at least.

And for google who earns more than they know what do do with I'd say it is an embarrassingly easy-to-see-through anti-competitive behaviour.

And no Google AMP!

I use DuckDuckGo as I said, but you can easily switch the default search StartPage; which shouldn't give you stripped down search results.

> However on Google's search, they give you a stripped down version of their search results inferior to what Chrome gets.

That stripped down version of Google search is why I mainly use Firefox on Android :) You can also avoid AMP results this way last time I tried.

It's easy to critique them for being too big, but what solution do you have? Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products?

I realize that they are really big, and with more products, they get more data, but imagine for one second that your goal truly was to help customers and provide them with as many useful tools as possible, what options would you have?

You either make more products that helps people (and end up getting more data), or you don't, stay stale, and end up going down like Yahoo or many other company who don't evolve do.

It's in corporations' nature to grow, just like Microsoft did in its antitrust days, and Google (and Amazon and others) are now. It can be dangerous.

I don't expect corporations to stop growing by themselves. But consumers can use alternative products, and tech workers can prefer to work at other companies. We can limit the danger that way.

I fall under this line of thinking too.

I am a gmail/drive/cal user primarily. I find their services fast, reliable, secure and integrated to a lot of other services.

Sure, they collect and sell my browsing data. But so what? It costs me nothing, doesn't impact my experience (outside of the occasionally annoying ad), and provides them revenue to keep innovating.

I don't really understand the anti-google sentiment that's been brewing lately. Why not the same aversion to apple, microsoft, and amazon? Or is it just flavor of the month?

Personally I'd much rather use Hire over LinkedIn. But I guess it's just one devil for another.

> Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products?

Yes.

I want an economy where we have millions of tiny companies, each doing one thing, and doing that well. Like the German Mittelstand.

Having Amazon split up into dozens of smaller companies for different categories just sounds really annoying to me.

You don’t have to split up by category. But you should split up by business model.

One entity would run the marketplace, another entity would do the Amazon Basics products, and AWS would be a third entity.

A single entity controlling the market place, products, distribution platform, and infrastructure just screams of antitrust.

Generally, no company should be allowed to both run a marketplace, and offer products on it.

> but what solution do you have?

It isn't easy, but as long as nation states are plausibly more powerful than Google, we—humanity—can hope.

Use antitrust to inhibit moves like the one under discussion.

Use privacy legislation to plug the Google data vacuum nozzle.

Suspend net neutrality in ways calculated to allow ISPs to suck Google dry, while not hurting anybody else too much.

It's not about being big. It's about the fact that every product they release is deliberately designed to siphon more data off their users. Everything's stored server-side, everything's identifiable, everything's quid-pro-quo where the service is crippled without your data.

A prime example is the way they now channel so much of Android's data through Google Play Services. The updated permissions model is great if you want to stop third parties creeping on you, but with everything going through Google Play Services, your phone can only give you data if that data first goes to Google. If you don't permit Google Play Services to access your location, not only does Maps pettily default you to the wrong continent but even the Gmail app scolds you for having location data turned off.

Don't conflate 'deliberately invasive' with 'big'.

This is not for you. This is for your company to use. It's tied to Google Suite.

Why is it useful to a company unless Google provides "value add" features that are better than thousands of other services for hiring.

It is about the integrated experience. Most big companies I know of actually hire recruiting co-ordinators for scheduling and following up with potential candidates as well as with interviewers internally. If Google can use their G-Suite products including Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc. to provide a seamless recruiting experience, I would give it a shot - especially if my company is already on G Suite.

Now that Google has the building blocks for businesses - Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Video Conferencing etc. - it makes sense for them to get into common enterprise services. This ways they can extract more rent and also provide an integrated/more valuable experience to their customers.

I'd argue this is a tangental product.

You can easily use Google Suite, but also use Workday (which provides a similar service to Hire).

I can see the n-gate summary now: "Google finds another way to make money by spying on people. Hackernews ignores the article and instead settles in for a good old iPhone vs Android debate."

Isn't the replacement for Android right now iOS? Still proprietary but Apple seems to take a much tougher stance on privacy.

It seems more a marketing strategy than a real belief in user privacy. For example, see the latest rejection of ad-blocking VPN apps from the App Store https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts-app-s...

Those VPN apps install a root cert don't they? That's a huge security hazard and likely why Apple is putting their foot down on it.

It's not marketing - Apple goes out of their way to build privacy into their products. For example, the way that Apple Maps has no persistent user identifier and prevents Apple from knowing your location history.

Regarding ad-blocking VPNs, I can see why one might be sad to lose these and disagree with Apple's move here. But it's not a privacy decision - it's an ad-blocking decision. VPNs actually focused on privacy, like privateinternetaccess, aren't being removed from the App Store.

I've never been able to take seriously the argument that anything Apple is "just marketing", and I'm not about to now.

I totally agree. But hiring talent is hard. I assume companies will grab every opportunity to hire the best people. Even if that means using Google.

> FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw)

I just tried to install Firefox on my phone, because the builtin browser regularly crashes.

I browsed one page. It felt like my phone was about to melt. So I'm still using the builtin browser that crashes after fully loading a page.

Try Firefox beta

The regular FF is terrible, but the beta one works OK for me

I fully agree, but I just could not get used to DuckDuckGo. It just pales in comparison to Google Search somehow, but I find it difficult to explain why. The same applies to Firefox, I really tried, but especially the extension ecosystem in Chrome is more mature. For example, Lastpass works much better in Chrome than Firefox.

Considering this, I switched to Fastmail and removed my Google account from all my browsers. I created a dummy Google account that I only use to set my home address (again, too handy) and to be able to set preferences and have a Chrome profile.

To me, this is the best of both worlds right now.

HN should build a bot that posts this comment automatically on every Google post to save these guys from having to type the same thing over and over.

I agree - it's boring to see "but they close projects so you can't trust them" comments every time Google does anything constructive.

Maybe the bot could also post an "If you provide a free service, how are you obligated to provide it forever?" response, to save me having to.

They've gotten to big for their breeches. If you're tech, try to mitigate a bit by using services from other companies.

You can also try Brave which blocks ads and trackers. And is based on firefox afaik.

Maybe you can choose to use only the open source parts of Android?

You should read about the founder of DuckDuckGo

For the lazy: --- 2008: DuckDuckGo was founded[15] by Gabriel Weinberg,[16][17] an entrepreneur whose previous venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million.

This is most relevant snippet I could find about DDG's founder.

So I found this[0] but haven't read it yet. Was there something we should be looking for?

[0] - https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/search-engine-and-pri...

Couple that with the fact that they do not offer anything that deserves the moniker "customer service".

I've gotten excellent customer service from them with Google Express. They certainly can offer good customer service where they choose to.

If you pay them you get good customer service. Google Play, YouTube Red, Chromecast, Chromebook, Nexus, all have pretty good service.

Google Fi as well

I completely disagree. Recently did a factory reset on my nexus only to find out that without the password for the last sync'd google account, a throwaway I don't remember, it's bricked. I can report it stolen on the device page, can easily prove to google it's my device, but I can't reset or sell or do anything with the phone. Google's response after spending days trying to fix, and talking to different support people who had wildly different answers, the only viable answer was to give me the number for Lg and wish me good luck. Never have I paid so much for a product which is broken by its own design while being entirely unsupported by the vendor. Never will I purchase a google product or service and I will tell everyone I know to do the same.

Was the disk encrypted?

(I work at google but not on android).

That's because, short of sending you a new device, there isn't any way to bypass the theft prevention. Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?

Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?

This is a pretty disingenuous analogy. GP did not ask about recovering data from the device. GP asked about starting over from scratch. Most people do have the expectation that an old encrypted drive can be reformatted and repurposed without knowing the key.

True, but in this case, you're "encrypting" (or really, securing) your device, and not your data. (I realize this will be misunderstood because "encrypting your device" normally means encrypting the data on your device).

The whole point of that is as an anti-theft measure (a stolen device [with a locked bootloader] cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission). It would be kind of silly if you could bypass that by saying "no look, its mine I just forgot the password.".

Now admittedly, I'm unsure if you need to know the original password, or if you can change the password online and then reset it, but I think the second would work.

As an aside, this I think fits into a trope I see repeatedly (and pretty much only on HN). I'm not making any judgement about whether being privacy conscious is good or bad. But I find it amusing when people state something like "This product is awful because I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX> and then <some product was not useful, and my experience was notably less good than other people>."

>cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission)

Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since

> I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX>

I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"

>Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since

The point, in this case, is not to keep the data secure, but to disincentivise theft of the device. You cannot resell a phone that prevents someone from using the device.

>I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"

To be clear, doing a factory reset wasn't the privacy-conscious thing. Using a throwaway google account to set up the device was. The flow in this case is that the phone will say something like "please enter the username and password of the old account on this device before logging in with a new user account." If they knew the password to their old account, there wouldn't be any issue.

I factory reset devices fairly often and so I run into this a lot, and its not an issue because I know the password to the google account that I use.

I fully accept the premise that a theft prevention system will limit the users ability to do certain tasks. My point was that this feature should also have blocked the factory reset from happening in the first place. That way, your data is still there, but access is conditional on you having the right keys, and there are no surprises.

>I fully accept the premise that a theft prevention system will limit the users ability to do certain tasks. My point was that this feature should also have blocked the factory reset from happening in the first place.

It doesn't sound like that would have made any difference here (ie. instead of "I have a phone I can't use" the complain would be "I can't remove this old google account from my phone")

And actually, as an anti-theft tool, you don't want that, since you want to be able to remotely factory reset your device in case it is stolen (ie. the find my phone features).

(Disclaimer: I worked at an Android OEM company).

Someone at LG or Qualcomm can definitely fix this easily and it takes about 30 seconds to do so. All it takes is to do a "chip erase" which will clear the QSEE sector and allow a complete factory reset.

Just ask the thousands of pissed off AdWords advertisers about their customer service

The few times I needed help with my project Fi connection it took about 3 minutes to reach a human. Even faster if I was willing to chat instead of call.

Even without reading the article, this is what I came to add. Now they have a service of this nature, the need and urgency of saying goodbye to Google has increased tremedously.

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