Hacker News Reader

Your comments generally tend to be insightful, but this one is downright terrible.

If there's a correlation between using surveillance-based email and income, it's likely positive - the well paid people are the most wed to the overarching power structure that surveillance supports, and the technically inclined ones are most likely to be directly working for the surveillance companies!

Yes, the surveillance industry takes advantage of disadvantaged people in the same manner that Bank of America does. That's not the topic of discussion or the focus of the OP.

"Privilege" pity parties accomplish nothing more than derailing whataboutism. Yes, not everybody is able to pay/host their own email. For the sake of everyone, especially those who cannot choose, you'd better hope those who can will spend the effort to stop supporting the surveillance companies.

I think the comment I replied is pretty terrible. The article is actually really excellent and gives practical advice as to how small time operators can effectively avoid being part of the problem by just using an AGPL license on their open source code. But that aspect is being ignored to moralize about what a terrible person you are if you use any Google services.

The original comment is directed at a community where the sheer majority have the aptitude and attention to be deliberate about technology choices. In that context, yes, we should all be trying to distance ourselves from Google. And we're all failing at it, and we can all be trying harder.

I have personally regressed a bit due to life circumstances, using a lot more bareback Chromium these days. But a lack of ability to chose a better alternative doesn't invalidate the judgment that there are indeed better options.

It would be incredibly easy to frame the comment as "For those of us with the privilege such that not making such choices amounts to laziness." It isn't framed that way because the 99 percent are implicitly assumed to not exist or not read HN or something. That's inherently problematic.

If you can't even acknowledge that a large portion of the population exists, there is going to be hell to pay when your proposed solutions de facto step all over them.

How is it "inherently problematic" to write a comment on a forum for technologists in the context that its readers will be technologists?

I mean, you might as well choose any arbitrary thread about a programming language and complain that the only implementation(s) require a computer, which requires non-universally-possessed resources to obtain/upkeep, and furthermore not everybody has time to program!

Also, asserting that "99 percent" are straight up unable to choose a new email provider is preposterous.

How is it "inherently problematic"

It promotes an echo chamber and is de facto exclusionary.

Minorities frequently complain that most people "bet" you will be one of the majority. If 90 percent of the time, X is true, they assume X is true in all cases rather than hedging their bet that maybe this is that 10 percent case where a woman is the boss or a person of color is the boss or the person you are speaking to is gay or whatever. It helps create an atmosphere hostile to minorities and other disempowered people.

Fighting the tyranny of probability distributions makes sense for orthogonal properties, but it's utterly nonsensical when the straightforward purpose of this forum is to facilitate discussion between technologists.

Anyone can join. There is no requirement that you be a particular demographic.

It's important to point out that thinking of free versus paid in financial terms alone does not reveal the true scope of the issue. As you are probably aware, you are 'paying' with personal data, which can be viewed as a more durable asset than cash. When you can afford to pay for something, you can buy it and it's a done deal. When you pay with data, the other party knows something about you forever. They can sell it an unlimited number of times to an unlimited number of buyers. It is quite different from a one-time monetary purchase.

I'm not going to preach that one way is right and the other is wrong - I just want to point out that they are two quite different schemes. Also, you sound well educated and underemployed - I wish you good luck and hope you get paid closer to what you are worth soon.

Personal information is not something with which I can buy my groceries or pay my pediatrician, so it's pretty understandable why people would not consider it on the same level as money or other assets.

There is some truth to the idea that you need a middle class income to afford middle class morality. Pretending that the poor are equally free to make the exact same choices as others ...well, that pretty well fits my definition of evil. It's simply not true and it conveniently blames people who are usually a victim of the system to some degree or another.

On the other hand, since this data about you can be sold over and over its value is likely to decrease over time. Perhaps those who "spent" their data on a decade of free email got in on the ground floor and others will eventually be forced to trade their data for much less, or perhaps nothing at all.

If you feel strongly about privacy, you could switch to something like Proton Mail. There is a free tier but you would have to dance around the space limitations (500 MB). I personally still use gmail but have been considering moving away from their services.

I am not providing firsthand testimony so that people can toss out half baked ideas as to how I can comply with their priorities if I am willing to jump through a few hoops as if I have the time, energy and mental space to jump through more hoops.

All future replies: pretty please address the issue raised concerning systemic problems and stop talking about me and my life.

The expectation that I need to dance around storage limits, migrate to a new service after years and years with gmail as if that is not a burden and generally care more about the upper class values and priorities of internet strangers than about my own actual needs is monstrously classist and dismissive. And it completely ignores the issues I raised.

Well, you don't seem to feel very strongly about privacy, so you could have safely ignored the rest of the parent comment's advice.

> All future replies: pretty please address the issue raised concerning systemic problems and stop talking about me and my life.

Stop adding irrelevant personal details to your comments.

Why is privacy an upper class value?

It may not be one of your values, as evidenced by your choice of email provider, but it has nothing to do with class, or dismissing your own needs. You can be poor and refuse to hand over your data to big corporations, or rich and have a Gmail account and keep using Google search because of the convenience.

You are the owe that chose to bring up personal details out-of-the-blue in this discussion. There were comments showing that there are ways to ensure your online privacy without necessarily spending money. The fact you do not wish to do so, is irrelevant to your economic situation.

Poor people often cannot afford privacy on quite a lot of levels.

When I was homeless, one of the places I could get a free shower had an open bay of 8 showerheads where I could shower with up to 7 strangers. I could get showered or I could protect my privacy and dignity. I could not do both. I needed a shower more than I needed to make sure total strangers never saw me naked.

Maybe you have heard the expression Beggars can't be choosers?

I did everything in my power to make judicious choices under extremely difficult circumstances. But the most charitable read I can give of your question is that you are so privileged, you honestly don't get it. There are people who are doing everything in their power to fight the good fight in spite of poverty and myriad other burdens. And at some point, you have to make compromises. Maybe you get the free option. Or maybe you become a criminal because it pays better than the legal gigs you can find. Or you make some other compromise because there simply aren't the above board good options available to you that you wish there were. Period.

The comparison between showering as a homeless individual and choosing an email provider does not work. The choice is not Gmail or no email, the choice is Gmail and slightly less convenient alternatives that do not spy on you, which you choose depending on your personal beliefs, not economic situation.

If you have the time to post on HN, you clearly have the time to change your email provider if it aligns with your personal beliefs.

Why do you feel the need to bring up personal details about your hardships in life? Being no longer homeless, you are, globally speaking, on the upper scale of social classes yourself, being from the United States, having 6 years of university, having worked at a Fortune 200 company, and currently having enough time to post on HN.

> If you have the time to post on HN, you clearly have the time to change your email provider if it aligns with your personal beliefs.

Meh, changing email addresses is a major pain in the ass. So much so that I've hosted my own mail server for decades, including configuring sendmail, to avoid it.

Changing bank addresses (aka accounts) is comparatively easier and there is real money directly on the line, and yet banks still clearly make loads off of account stickiness.

Posting on HN is procrastination.

Why do you feel the need to bring up personal details about your hardships in life?

I speak from firsthand experience. Many people do that on a regular basis here, but their firsthand experience is as a comfortably well off male so no one has any objections to them mentioning their gender, the kind of work they do, their general social class, etc.

Suggesting I should not ever mention any of the details of my life amounts to trying to make sure no comfortably well off people need to be disturbed by the awareness that people like me exist and it de facto takes the position that my life experiences and points of view are less valid than that of people with cushier lives and fundamentally not welcome here.

And I don't only talk about my hardships, of course that fact also gets used against me. Never mind that my life is still far from comfortable, if I have time to post to HN, my life is too cushy to complain about. Wow. The denial here runs deep.

Somewhat unsurprisingly the usual Google Cars/Buses/Streetsigns recaptcha is used by Proton Mail once you go past a certain amount of signups per IP.

There is simply no escaping this reCaptcha. Once in a while you hit some bad ones and have to waste 5 minutes or just give up on a particular service.

>But I don't and trying to remedy that is proving to be a huge uphill battle. I have six years of college. I worked at a Fortune 200 company at one time. I was one of the top students of my state.

You're right, none of this insulates you against poverty. The only thing that does that is creating value. You can be the most educated person on the planet, but if you don't actually make anything with all that education, you won't gain money. You're whining that no one has given you any money, even though you have all these credentials. Being educated or a good student != producing value. Sorry if someone misled you during your education.

It is always easiest to blame 'the people' for making bad decisions and enabling systems we disagree with, but you are right that this is a mistake. More important is addressing the predatory nature of the systems that makes them successful.

When there is only one option being sold to you (the 'free' one), what choice do you have? And when you don't really know the cost you are paying (because who knows the true value of any piece of data you provide), then how could you know if you are paying a fair price?

There is no 'true' value of anything. The entire fundamentals of trade depend on the fact that everyone values things differently.

If I'm a rice farmer, maybe I want fish more because I have none, and likewise the fisher would want rice.

In this case, my 'data' has absolutely zero value to me. What am I going to do with it? It's anonymised, so it's not really a security concern. And for the most part it's innocuous stuff like "I like video games". But maybe Google can use it to tweak for better ads, so they see value in it.

On the otherhand, having a robust, availible, free magic box that answers any question I can possibly have (Google Search) has so much value to me.

If you don't agree with the exchange, for the most part there are alternatives like duckduckgo (search) with the trade off of slightly worse results (arguably), or ProtonMail (email) where it will cost $12 per month.

But for me, I consider it a fair trade.

Free email based outside the US: ProtonMail[1]. I recommend it as a non-paying user.

[1]: https://protonmail.com