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Comment by turk183 | Hacker News Reader

I just spent the better part of a week getting myself off of GMail. I'm still using Chrome at work for development, but have Brave browser for personal use now. I'm using DuckDuckGo for searches. I have an iPhone, but honestly, I don't trust Apple to not act like total dumbasses and so I am now lamenting the consolidation in the smart phone space.

Google and these other companies are blowing themselves up over idiotic politics. It may be a trickle today, but it doesn't take much for a trickle to become a raging river of people migrating off your ecosystem. Are you listening Google? Or are you so tone deaf and smug that you can't hear anymore?

Maybe it's time anyways--Google and Facebook are so lame. They are so anathema to what the original Internet was all about. Hint: It's about humanity and open access to ideas, not closed plantations with no diversity of thought allowed.

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There's a lot of us, apparently, who independently came to the same conclusion at the same time. My YouTube account is deleted, my Google+ page is deleted, my emails are wiped.

There's an anti-trust suit against Google looming. The only possible challenge to Google's power is nation states; not individuals, not startups, and not even other large tech firms. Like any corporate entity (i.e. a sociopath), they'll inevitably start using their influence on the public to avoid any kind of regulation or anti-trust legislation. Therefore it's certain that the total politicization of Google is imminent.

There's an impending and complete certainty Google will begin: subtle manipulation of news feeds, outright censorship of opposing viewpoints, backdoor deals with politicians in pay-for-play schemes, insincere attempts to integrate Google services with the state (would you like to ride the Google self driving bus to work for free?)... and most ominously, given their massive ability to psychologically profile everyone on the planet (to the point of being able to infer IQ, political opinions, emotional tendencies, income, social profile) -- targeted, tailored manipulation of the human mind to suit Google's ends.

In fact they've started all of the above.

I switched to Protonmail (paid account). Then I started going through my password vaults and removing or modifying every account that had been tied to a Gmail address. Then I sold my new OnePlus 5 because just thinking about supporting Google keeps me up at night, now... and I had that Gmail account since 2004. It's good to know that I'm not the only one.

They already perform censorship of materials. Even if you don't take child porn/"Pirate Bay" type stuff into account, Google removes/blocks/filters out an enormous amount of content in the forms of images, videos, audio, and printed words.

Unfortunately for me, I am tied into their ecosystem in such a way that I can't remove myself, because too many work-required and other accounts use Google-provided solutions, and it is required by clients or whatnot. Even my tv and blu-ray player are powered by Android.

The original Internet was about connecting military and academic institutions via physically-secured machines and infrastructure decentralization.

We're at least two major iterations into "What the Internet is about" now.

Yes, my segue into all of this was 1991 if that helps. SMTP, FTP, Gopher, Usenet--protocols, not platforms controlled by psychotic billionaires.

What email service did you switch to? I'm thinking of doing the same.

I personally switched to ProtonMail, but I lament there's no IMAP access.

If you don't mind paying you can use FastMail

Big fan of FastMail. Roughly $50 a year to control my email destiny? No brainer.

You may want to take a look at the list here https://www.privacytools.io/#email for alternative email providers with higher privacy standards.

Just switched to Fastmail and so far has been very easy and simple.

Protonmail. I can afford the $50/yr. for better email and it's something I should have done a long time ago. I was a GMail user since GMail was a thing, though. It breaks my heart to see Google do this stuff, but I just can't morally stay with them. I don't know what they are, I don't know how compromised they are by the intelligence agencies that run this country, I don't know a lot of things.

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