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Comment by pointillistic | Hacker News Reader

How do you unGoogle? They have my phone, my email. Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. I doubt Visa and Amex are far behind, it's free money for them so there is no point in canning Master. What a disaster! Ad supported Internet is the root of the problem.

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Did you read Chaos Monkeys? What about Dragnet Nation? Both (of which are not new) peek behind the curtains you're concerned about. Both are recommended, and freightening. It's only going to get worse.

https://www.antoniogarciamartinez.com/chaos-monkeys/

http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/

Borrowed Chaos Monkeys from the library based on this post. Thanks for the recommendation, it's very engaging so far.

The best bit - relevant to this HN privacy discussion - is about two-thirds in. It's where FB cracks the code (breaks the back of privacy) and heads for advertisers' nirvana. And that was 5+ yrs ago.

And yes, his style is very entertaining. I hope you enjoy it.

You can use ios or lineageos. You can use an email such as protonmail (although I personally find them just a touch shady, they're no doubt miles better than gmail) or host your own. Don't shop at whole foods. Pay with cash.

Just out of curiosity, what feels shady about ProtonMail?

I believe a competitor of theirs has been actively trying to spread distrust of them on HN. I don't remember the details well, but I think they allege that ProtonVPN and ProtonMail aren't independent from each other when they claim they are.

There is a smear campaign going on, but not about precisely this. The smear campaign is that since ProtonVPN is free, it must be doing something nefarious.

ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are legally separate, but they are both part of the Proton family of projects which originated from CERN.

I'm not sure what competitor you're referring to, I don't think they have many of those (tutanota, maybe? Or startmail?) but I assure you I don't work for one of those. There's not another email provider I have significantly more trust in or that I think does everything right while protonmail does everything wrong, there's just a minor sticky feeling that I have using them.

Thank you, I am aware of the alternatives but it's an uphill battle to fight a monopoly, i.e. I have only Comcast here as Internet option, etc.

Well, it is somewhat of an uphill battle, sure, but every hill has a top ;-)

As for internet, you can always get yourself a VPS and tunnel everything through that, so your monopoly ISP doesn't get to see anything of what you do.

Not using google is actually a piece of cake. Ther are reasonable competitors for nearly all of their services, except maybe translate and maps. Though I have been looking at OSM a lot lately.

I, personally, use an DuckDuckGo, an iPhone and Apple mail. Amazon isn't an issue really- just buy whatever you were going to get on amazon somewhere else - it's pretty rare that I find a noticeable price difference (unless we're talking about the cheap off branded stuff on amazon - but I don't want things like that anyway).

DeepL is a good alternative to Google Translate, though it is quite a bit more limited in terms of features and languages. I often find DeepL translations to be of higher quality than Google's (for the 2-3 languages I regularly translate between).

> Not using google is actually a piece of cake

not using google is easy, not losing data for 15+ years and counting is significantly harder. even Apple dropped my photos due term of service change, I had to scramble gigabites off internet into disks and now my collection is an unindexed mess.

To be fair to Google, they (mostly) make it fairly easy to move out; exporting your Photos with Takeout returns a nice archive where each image is accompanied by a JSON file with metadata. It's not any standard format, as far as I can tell, but should be easy enough to massage into whatever you want.

For email, there's Fastmail, which is great and the web UI is clean, simple and fast. If your phone is supported, you can install LineageOS on it without any Google apps.

A couple of years ago, I decided to go with Runbox for email along with some self-hosted solutions. It has been great - Gmail over IMAP is relegated to newsletter subscriptions. I also use LineageOS on my phones and tablets.

Unfettered, profit-at-all-costs is the problem. Paying for something brings no shred of chance that your data isn't being harvested. Zero.

Most people pay for credit cards by way of yearly fees, they track you. Purchase music? Your music is cross referenced in the name of discoverability. Hardware? Same.

Some of those things might be helpful in some contexts, and in others not. That fuzzy line is the discourse.

With all of that said, to cite the locus of all evil as “ad supported” as the problem is a logical fault line.

It is vital to unGoogle, to protect your data. Totally possible.

1. Switch everything to Apple, hardware company. iPhone, Mac OS

2. Use myname@icloud.com email, create few email aliases. Forward your gmail to it, and finally delete gmail accounts.

3. Don't use any of Googles software, like Chrome. Install adbocker extention/app and use Private Browsing windows by default

4. Buy a VPN subscription and set up your phone and Mac to always use it (on-demand).

What makes you think your VPN company isn't selling your net usage data to Google?

I carefully selected it :) Even if it does, there are other benefits:

- ISP has no clue what you do

- Your IP is hidden, major feature for fingerprinting you by websites, trackers and Google.

You could move to Apple and use Apple Pay Cash to buy purchases you'd rather not be tracked and sold to Google (and a million other companies).

[correction: Apple Pay Cash should indeed be a workable shield.] Using Apple Pay [not the "Cash" feature] only hides your details from the retailer, not from the credit card company nor evidently from Google.

I said Apple Pay Cash, and yes, it does.

https://applepaycash.greendot.com/privacy/

Sorry I didn't realize the distinction you were making! you are right that seems to be an electronic equivalent to cash.

https://applepaycash.greendot.com/termsconditions/

It appears that Apple Pay cash doesn’t share much, although they do say ‘We may disclose information that is not personally identifiable for other purposes.’

What they mean exactly by ‘personally identifiable’ is open to interpretation.

re: Whole Foods, I've never heard of a place that was a food desert but for Whole Foods. You should take your business somewhere else if you don't want Amazon to have data on your grocery purchases.

Funny anecdote, my fiance used to live in midtown Detroit near the Whole Foods. At the time the groceries situation was worse, it was more-or-less a food desert other than that Whole Foods [0].

I don't know how folks who can't afford a car would get groceries (an hour round trip on the bus, I guess), but that can be said about nearly everything in Michigan. The whole wealth bootstrapping problem is really unsolved out there, you can't get started on anything without like $5k for a car and car-related expenses.

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/search/midtown+detroit+groceries...

> Amazon now follows my grocery shopping at Whole Foods.

Shop at Aldi. https://aldi.us/stores/

Or pay cash!

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