Why I’m Worried About Google
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But despite this, and the lower quality search results of DDG, I'm still going to push forward with degooglifying my stuff. But I'm in deep. Drive, keep, Gmail, photos, hell I'm even typing this on a pixel 2. It's gonna take a while.
It's been surprisingly difficult finding a good replacement for keep. If anyone has suggestions I'm open. I'll probably make the shift to protonmail to replace Gmail. Not sure what do to about drive at this time.
The issue is that Google's stuff has always been very reliable and performance (well performant enough). For example I'll often ping Google.com for a network test. Google.com is never down, it's always my hardware, or my ISP, never Google.
Im just rambling at this point, but I think somewhere in there is a point about reliability, ease of use, and security that makes Google's products so compelling. Hence why they'll be able to get away with privacy issues like this.
So, pick your battles. SimpleNote is the solution to Keep. FireFox addon's are getting better now Chrome and Firefox agreed a common format so wait on that one. Protonmail is great, but simple so don't expect the bell's and whistles you're used to.
Photo's is still the best product around so personally I'd stick with it, same for Drive (although Dropbox does work and is solid).
Maybe its all futile, but I'm committed to degoogling my life at least 50%. They've shown their hand and I don't like what I see.
Fastmail's another option. Their 2FA authentication options are about as robust as Google's.
The best I found by a mile is Notion.so. In fact, it is such a great app, it has promted me to consider migrating years of OneNote notebooks, along with trying it out as a replacement for Todoist.
Google photos I replaced with Amazon Prime Photos (from pan to fire, I know, but I'm still oddly happier).
Google Drive was the easiest - I use a combo of DropBox and Arq Backup Tool going to Backblaze B2.
Email has been hard. I have always maintained my own email domain, but had that forward to gmail for the convenience. Not sure what I'm going to do there.
Hope that helped.
I use it to replace Evernote, primarily, but also for building requirements docs, todo lists, or notes.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... seems to suggest feature parity, at the very least
Isn't this mostly because you don't know yet how the same features work in FF and DDG?
And don't get me started on the really bad font rendering. Firefox is still behind Edge and Chrome, hell, even IE (at least on Windows).
*: something you need to do more often in Firefox because the extension's autofill feature is even finicky than in the Chrome extension.
* No Chromecast support
* Missing pinch to zoom support (smooth as butter in Chrome). Possible via Add-on "Multi-touch zoom" [1] in Fx but it's very sluggish.
* Youtube is much slower, also some features don't work there, like being able to scroll down when having a fullscreen video open. Can be fixed by installing "Classic Youtube" [2]
* Fullscreen is broken for me, I was not able to hide the address bar and tab bar. I had to install "Fullscreen Plus"
* Some extensions don't work as good, like Dark Reader [3]
* No good alternatives for some Chrome extensions, like "The Great Suspender" [4] or "Vanilla Cookie Manager" (Cookie AutoDelete for Firefox)
* Pdfium performs much better than Firefox' solution. Unfortunately Mozilla abandoned Project Mortar [5].
I could go on with the list. Don't get me wrong, I will still stick to Firefox even though Google Chrome is the superior product performance- and feature-wise.
[1] https://github.com/haxiomic
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...
[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
^wow how quickly people forgot about NSA spying, snowden etc.
As for the Pixel it's ok, just switch to LineageOS, but you'll want F-Droid + Yalp, or F-Droid + Aptoide if you feel adventurous (awesome project but they are just getting started.
Drive... I'd recommend Nextcloud, but then you need to choose a provider since it's decentralised. If you're in Europe I'd say woelkli.com, if you're in Asia or America sorry I don't know what to recommend but I'm sure there are good options. Nextcloud will do a lot more for you if you need (CalDAV, CardDAV, Password manager, Bookmarks manager, etc).
Would it be better to just use something like Emacs org mode and store the data in .git?
https://standardnotes.org/help/47/can-i-self-host-standard-n...
I use Apple Notes, Keep, and email myself stuff all the time.
I don't think I'll stop that, but I can at least keep a singular source now. I might even self host...
If we can get support for self-contained inline images/attachments, and inter-note linking then I'll be all-in.
I had the good fortune of realizing that I was less tied to Google than I thought.
> For example I'll often ping Google.com for a network test. Google.com is never down, it's always my hardware, or my ISP, never Google.
I've stopped doing this recently when, during a string of nearly-statewide Frontier outages, Google services still worked while everything else was inaccessible (actually happened multiple times over the course of a week). It felt a little bizarre watching YouTube videos fine but being unable to connect to IRC. I've started pinging Cloudflare instead.
For search IMVHO there is no point in switching between Google search and other equivalent search engine, simply because DDG, QWant etc are still company offering something from their own server. So I try to switch to YaCy (FOSS distributed search engine, a bit a java monster but not as monstrous as many Java crap we all know. I still use few time a day Google search mostly because it work far better...
On Keep I switch to Orgzly on mobile and sync my notes or to be more precise the sole parts of them I want on mobile, via org-mode+rsync. On Android sync without cloud is a pity due to limited fs access, however Termux work wall enough...
I have no need of Drive and I use personal calendar (via CardDav/Radicale) and contacts so I'm less bound.
However I'm still on Android seeing no real alternatives, SailFish was a substantial fail, Purism phone it's not there, OpenMoko, GreenPhone, ... are all old dead projects...
I have my Gmail account logged in on 3 PC's going back to IMAP and Thunderbird never.
I could run a mail server myself, but I don't believe that I can achieve comparable levels of spam filtering without excessive effort, so I would need someone else to provide this service.
I also agree about TB, classic MUA seems to be remained in the 90's however at leas for us not-basic-users notmuch-emacs, mutt&forks, pine&forks, mu4e etc are valuable options, long to setup-up, mostly because anyone have a personal recipe and no one offer a ready-to-use solution, but far more powerful than any webmails.
However mailpie can be consider a good GMail-inspired webmails and IMVHO for most of mail users Roundcube even if is really basic it's enough, clear, simple and effective. Contacs are a bit limited compared to Google's one but the rest work well.
Too bad Canonical dropped Ubuntu Touch. There are other debian-based contenders but I think Tizen is currently the only practical choice. Unfortunately Tizen's code has a terrible reputation.
So... as I type this to you Google is probably watching me. Yay.
I've been on the hunt for a good Keep replacement myself, but not exactly a replacement for the "Simple" Keep interface. In my perfect world I wanted something markdown based for taking notes, and syncable between mobile and web. Most (but not all) of my personal checkmarks has been checked with Joplin[1] which was not yet mentioned in this thread; at a glance:
- Synced via cloud accounts (Either it's Dropbox, OneNote, or even your own Nextcloud via WebDAV, if you wish to be public cloud free!)
- Notes are Markdown based
- Notes import done also via .md files, folder of .mds (including nesting), or even Evernote's ENEX format.
- Dedicated applications for PC/OSx/Linux and even Android & iOS native apps. No web interface available since it's used to sync to an external source. But with that much access with said applications, it's a tradeoff I can take.
(I just found out about this app this morning, so please excuse my enthusiasm :)
Gmail replaced by Fastmail. I used to think Fastmail's interface to be clunky - but no longer. It was never an issue, because you can very easily use any mail client, each with their own 'app password'.
Drawbacks: GMail's filtering it top notch, for both spam and their pre-defined categories (updates, social, etc). I never realized how many rules it saved me until I made the switch.
Browser changed to Firefox for the most part. Still not as battery efficient as I would like, and not as performant as Chrome in some sites (ironically, many of these belong to Google).
Google Cloud is nice, but I only use that at work.
Google maps is... difficult to replace. If I am in an Apple device, I can use that, but it's an inferior replacement.
The Google search engine is still second to none. I have made the switch to DuckDuckGo, but I find myself using !g VERY often.
Some things are just nice to have. The damn Google Cloud Print service works more reliably than trying to print from OSX over wifi. I have no idea why.
My 'breaking point' was not privacy or security. It's just that Google pulls the plug on projects surprisingly often. So I figured a gradual transition would be better. It's a very slow transition indeed...
One of the hard parts will be to leave behind the awesome google photo
In the end, this is why I’m moving away from the Google ecosystem. If nothing else works, then at least I can vote with my feet—or my fingertips.
Google have set their path, so it will take effort for them to deviate from it. The best way to show them that the effort is worthwhile is to affect their bottom line by reducing your use of their services. And maybe you’ll find that the competitors are still there and pretty good.
Firefox has the added bonus that it doesn't implement a two tier cookie system. Of which one tier cannot be deleted.
This, in combination with the new and improved "sign-in-convenience" convinced me that Google is exactly as dirty as any other tech company and should be avoided like the plague, wherever possible.
DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Yahoo gets their search results from bing, so that's the same thing. So this supports my claim.
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/09/26/dolphin-browser-goes-...
I do. They make inferior software imo, but seem a lot less suspicious.
G Suite has definitely come a long way, but the Office suite of apps are absolutely the gold standard.
The fact that DDG sources information about the internet from Microsoft is unimportant. I'm concerned about my personal information, not large scale manipulation of search results.
I've tried searx instances as well, but couldn't find one that functioned consistent to my liking.
Believe it or not they are injecting all kinds of ad related JS.
I am even questioning their sincerity, since the page is badly optimized for usage.
And even lambda users pile up tabs when they browse
I'll download the extension tonight and give it a shot.
Worth noting that Opera is still an option, and built on Blink...
At that point, I had used my personal domain for close to 10 years when suddenly it stopped working. I contacted them and they said that it was put on hold because I hadn't paid the yearly expense. It would cost 16 times the normal cost to get it back, or I could wait a couple of months until it was released and see if I was able to buy it again at the normal rate before it was taking by someone else. I asked what they meant by expense? I usually get a reminder from them on email a month before due date, every year for the last 10 years, but my latest expense reminder from them was dated a year back. They explained that they have had trouble sending out reminders for this particular TLD for a while now. I asked why they hadn't contacted their users about these problems, to which they replied that it's my own responsibility to get the expense paid in due time, and that the reminders are just a friendly reminder, nothing more, nothing to be relied on, and I have to pay 16 times normal cost or it will get released in a couple of months.
I decided that I was not going to pay that, and that I wouldn't be using them as a domain registrar again. Luckily I wasn't that happy with the domain anyways and have never been. I have been fiddling with ideas for a new domain name for years, but have yet to find one, so it wasn't that big of a loss. But I sure as hell think it's shitty service from my domain registrar.
This is why you should have your own domain. You can switch providers trivially.
Here's my story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18130832
It was already in my mind when Gmail came out. Some months prior to their launch, I got my own domain. I was already sick of free online providers - be it email, photos, etc. I'd had to move multiple times due to their either disappearing or suddenly asking for money. So even though I always liked Google, and still do, I never allowed myself to believe that things won't change.
Regardless, the past is the past. The key point is not to make the same mistake going forward.
Were I smart, I'd set up a calendar reminder each year for my most important domains.
I'm sure some is personalization, but I've also compared results in incognito and Google is still better. I really want to like it, but I'm not going to sabotage my ability to efficiently find things.
Usually if the search is highly generic then Google definitely fares better and there's always the !g bang if DDG is not good enough for a specific search.
My two major search use cases are 'technical' (work related, programming, one of my projects) and 'location-based'.
(As a not quite sober news junkie, I'm trying reduce my 'events' search activity.)
Both DDG and Google work fine for technical stuff. Because I already know where to look, how to ask. YouTube is surprisingly (delightfully) great for my DIY projects (eg how to tile my bathroom).
Location based searches still drives me nuts. Both Apple Maps and Google Maps routinely give me ridiculous results. For the love of digital, why aren't closer results ranked higher?
So I end up using Yelp to find local stuff. While I like its 'update search results' as a navigate, their map UI/UX widget is terrible.
I'd probably leave my laptop home if I felt competent using mobile for location-based searches. Now, I'm lugging it every where, and regret it when I don't.
But I hardly ever used Chrome, and wasn't signed in when using Google most of the time. I suspect they don't have a complete profile to improve their results.
Still I would take somewhat worse search results over handing out all of my web usage any day :)
I finally made the jump to Brave and DuckDuckGo, but replacing Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Voice is going to be hard. Gmail will be the hardest since it's attached to so many of my online accounts.
Perhaps I'll do that this weekend; better now than never.
https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
(firefox and DDG user here)
[1] https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-captchas
The last push to stop using Chrome even occasionally has been the recent user-hostile changes, and the recent style redesign. It must be my middle aged eyes, but ever since that I had a significant misclick rate, despite or perhaps because of, all the extra whitespace. Of course now any contrast at all is against Google style guidelines.
I wish there were a neat way to avoid the online Google features every other site links to - Captchas, fonts, Google scripts and such. Possibly just for bloody-minded completeness, but I'd prefer to give them no data at all.
It's two clicks, you need to be really explicit about it. The first click opens a huge "You're about to turn on sync" dialog, where you have to click "Yes, I'm in" again.
I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but the article isn't factually correct. It's also by the same person who misunderstood the recent chrome changes and wrote a long blog post triggered by them misunderstanding what was going on (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyny83/google-chr...).
It sounds like you got up in arms because you thought that chrome now auto-syncs when you sign in to gmail, and wrote the blog post draft. Then you learned that this isn't the case but you kept your arms up anyway, added that unsubstantiated "- yet" and hit "publish" anyway, despite nothing really having changed.
(Disclaimer 1: I used to work for google, so I'm likely biased to give them more benefit of doubt. Disclaimer 2: This is a shared HN account (the password isn't exactly hard to guess), so not all of its comments or posts are written by me.)
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/10433312293267496...
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h...
> On macOS, WebGL power preferences allow non-performance-critical applications and applets to request the low-power GPU instead of the high-power GPU in multi-GPU systems - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1349799
> Faster tab switching in the majority of cases for our macOS users - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481519
> Improved the reactivity of Firefox on macOS - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824
I spent quite a bit of time trying to modify a half dozen settings in FF that were posted on reddit to emulate Chrome's scrolling behavior but none felt exactly right.
Recently I had used the Edge browser on a friend's machine and I felt like the scroll behavior was really fast and responsive as well.
This phone does phone calls, SMS, and I use the built-in browser on private mode. There's NOTHING Google on this phone, and I sign into nothing.
I do feel like I'm not part of the game any more, but I'm not part of the game any more!
It reinforces my choice to embrace the Apple ecosystem. While their products aren't perfect, they do take your privacy seriously and you do pay for it. But to me, that seems like a fair trade. Additionally, they have second to none customer support, so it's going to take a company providing the same level of support (3-5 business day repairs on laptops) for me to move away from Apple.
Not sure if/how there's a way for privacy ethics to win over economics/convenience.
I really doubt most people earning 500 euros or less would think on the benefit of Apple's privacy when looking at their price ranges, many times just mapped directly from dollars into local currencies.
Apple doesn't care about privacy any more than google believed in "do no evil". They collect data on you just like google does. They buy data from other vendors like google does. They sell data on you.
The idea that a company who gives data to the chinese government cares about privacy is laughable.
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-apple-china...
You shouldn't confine yourself to an "ecosystem" controlled by one company. Be that google or apple.
Apple had a choice: icloud in china or leave china. Would chinese citizens be better served if android was the only option?
As for data, apple collects less of it. You can verify that with a data request: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
And much of their data for apps like maps is anonymized.
On what basis can you reasonably equate their data efforts to google's? Everyone needs data, but apple does legitimately seem to take privacy more seriously.
I wish they'd add a few more domain options. Oh well, services are wonderful otherwise.
Hoping they refresh the Macbook Air this October so I can move away from Windows 10 automatically installing candy crush every time I do a clean install. Windows is moving right back to the bloat of yesteryear, but this time it's Microsoft bundling the garbage.
For now, I'd rather have most services with one provider I trust as that really is convenient for me. That was Google before (mistakenly?), but no longer.
There is little regulation in online advertising; GDPR helped a lot but most ad revenues are still generated in the US. I have a feeling that some regulation would go a long way in improving the online browsing experience and prevent incidents like this, which can get tiring: every time a trusted internet company makes a privacy "error", everyone is outraged, we shame the company to getting better yadda yadda.
"Worried About" sounds like it's Google who's being negatively affected by this, but that doesn't seem to be the main point of the story.
Is this a common pattern?
[Why] [I'm worried] [about Google].
"I'm worried about X" usually means that I'm concerned for X's welfare, but not always. It takes some context to disambiguate the phrase.
A couple of examples:
"I'm worried about that stray kitten."
"I'm worried about the lion perched in that tree."
They are both felines, but clearly in one case I'm concerned about the cat's safety, in the other case what the cat might do to me.
Answers were one-click response buttons: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree (top to bottom, in that order).
The first time I clicked "Strongly Disagree", a few questions in, the next question had the order of the answers reversed so that Strongly Agree was on bottom. Submitted an opposite sentiment before realizing what happened.
Strikes me as manipulative, like the survey really isn't so much for discovering my opinion as it is for collecting favorable ones. I wonder who will get the results, and to what end?
However, n=1. The timing might have been coincidental.
Am I the only person who relies on that feature daily for their work?
I tried Firefox for a while but I rely on that feature around once or twice a day and I preferred using Chrome for those browsing sessions. So I dumped Firefox and switched back.
I'm with you though, I really hope this opens back up into an all out competition between 3 or more big players. And I think firefox is in a great position to take up the "top" spot in terms of security, performance, and resource usage. They have been "paying their dues" for a while now working on that stuff, and it's starting to pay off. And if they gambled right, they might just have an architecture that is overall better than Chrome's, who will be stuck with the cruft they've slowly built up over the years.
I'm excited to try out the BAT payments feature! For those out of the loop, like I was a week ago, it's a way to pay what you want per month, divided proportionally by the time spent per site between the sites you visited, as a way of trying to compensate the publishers and creators for your ad blocking.
You use a crypto currency called Basic Attention Token (BAT).
If anyone has any questions about the setup process, I'd be happy to help.
As a side note: I live in Mexico, but I was happy to be able to fund a wallet and not be region-blocked for once.
Then they give everyone the opportunity to use a Patreon-Style support or view Ads, optionally.
Why isn't it ethical to target big Ad-Tech middle men like Google and Facebook and increase efficiency and privacy at the same time?
Of Firefox, Chrome, and Brave; Brave is by far the worst browser of the bunch. It's not even pretending not to be evil, let alone trying and failing like the others.
And that's also how the web was founded. No one agreed to anything. People just started to build.
If there isn't a law against it, they are allowed to do it.
Everyone who uploads free content on the web without a paywall essentially says "take it and display it however you like".
Besides that, Brave is essentially building a sustainable model in favor of publishers. They will be very thankful.
It is ad-blocker without an alternative model that is problematic for publishers, not Brave. So I don't see why anyone besides Ad-Tech has a problem with Brave.
You conveniently ignore that most publishers desparately want to see a new model succeed, because Google and Facebook take too much of a share of the publishers. Brave takes less then Google et al., so publishers get more. That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.
Brave isn't free of problems, but arguing from a moral perspective isn't legitimate. So where does your hostility come from? Do you work for some big ad-tech company?
Not the one you're responding to, but to say his/her reasoning isn't "legitimate" is a bit rich when the GP (me) was about ethics. I'm with you on Google/Fb getting all the ad spent, but I don't think another middleman and wannabe monopoly such as Patreon is going to solve it. I might be in the minority here, but I think its fair publishers get their clicks for their content-based, non-tracking ads; we need to drive tracking, targeting and other third-party crap out of the web under privacy regulations, though, because that's what breaks the feedback of ad spend to publishers/creators (apart from causing the general race-to-the-bottom trend).
I agree, I overlooked that.
Nonsense. The publishers agreed to sell their inventory to Google, just as the movie studios agreed to license their content to Netflix or sell it on DVD.
Everything else from your post stems from this fundamental misunderstanding about how publishers monetize their content.
> That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.
Then it's ethical for Brave to monetize The Guardian's content. It is not ethical for it to monetize everybody else's. The same with a piracy service. If a piracy service resells content it has an agreement from the owner to resell, that's kosher. It doesn't mean that it also gets to resell everybody else's content.
> Do you work for some big ad-tech company?
No. I'm just not stupid enough to accept Eich's stupid output.
Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free. Consequently there isn't a licence involved, in contrast to your movie example. The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.
No it's not, at least in the EU as of last month's copyright reform. Meaning aggregator and search sites need to pay royalties for syndicating significant portions to publishers. That it's technically possible to scrape content doesn't mean scraping doesn't run afoul of copyright legislation and press norms such as proper attribution. You could also technically "scrape" written books; yet re-publishing your own book copies isn't considered legal.
Besides, it isn't even in effect yet.
Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence.
> Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free.
They have spots on their web pages for advertisements that they sell to Google or other ad networks. Brave unilaterally takes those spots from the publisher for a price the publisher never agreed to.
> The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.
That's the point. They sold that inventory to Google, not to Brave.
We would not replace ads on page without both user and publisher consent.
We are focused first on user-private ads that go in the user's inventory (notification channel and private tab), paying the user in tokens which then flow by default to the user's top sites and creators on YouTube, Twitch, etc. These ads involve no publisher at all so we pay the user 70%. In either case: 1/ ad "inventory" owner gets 70%, way above the programmatic norm of 40% or much lower due to fraud; 2/ user gets at least as much as we do. HTH.
That's a gross misrepresentation.
Mozilla was an investor in Cliqz, so it's not precisely a full-on third party. And the data was (at least, according to the article) well anonymized.
I can see why Moz would want to try and keep up with the user advantages of collecting this information -- catching malicious URLs, etc -- but even if it's just appearance-wise, they've lost a bit of trust here.
Frankly I think they should have two distributions of Firefox, one that's bells-and-whistles for the best user experience, and another that takes a more aggressive pro-privacy stance. This can be little more than the set of preinstalled extensions + default config.
You could start by explaining how a privacy focused nonprofit is marginally worse than a multi-billion dollar advertising company with regards to privacy.
If a tobacco company makes a donation to a cancer research charity, do we now hate the charity?
Mozilla does not have a history remotely related to any sort of privacy violations, except in the eyes of those who think that literally anything to do with "telemetry" or "advertizing" is automatically evil.
Problem is, you can have non-privacy-invasive and non-malicious telemetry and advertizing.
Google and Microsoft are particularly nasty in this regard. But don't extrapolate their behaviour onto Mozilla.
edit: except when they're in a sprite :/
Had it for a while just forwarding everything to my gmail but have now cut the forwarding and switched fully. If you're in the Apple ecosystem the app I attribute to finally moving was Spark[2], which I discovered after Google announced it was killing off Inbox
If you're hinting at something more untoward could you spell it out for me, I can't find anything that painted it with an ugly brush
I'm sorry but these comments aren't really saying anything with any substance. If my mail provider "scans my email for targetting" - Do you mean ad targeting? Both the mail host and the app are paid products, not ad supported.
Related: https://www.privacytools.io/#email
I do understand your concern but I've always treated emails as I would postcards
I still can't fully switch from GMail, but I've prepared myself so I have to since I'm gonna pay.
And recently I deleted my last Google account after moving domains, voice number and email to other providers.
These are marketing companies and you are their product. This will only get worse. Opt out now.
There's a big jump to determining your levels of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, Extroversion. Do people post articles that imply a negative agreeableness? I don't know -- political articles are typically intended to persuade, so you can safely argue that the poster believes in the article they post. But I don't know what kind of assumptions you can make about someone's facebook posts -- much less their browsing / purchasing behavior -- to determine aspects of their personality.
There's a large jump there between an interest and "Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, Extroversion." I don't think any amount of "throw big data and other buzzword at it" will reduce that jump, because you're more likely to train against other attributes of your population than their personality.
"even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States"
Who knows what other 3rd party data they correlate...
“Global leading company in payment solutions offering credit, debit, prepaid cards and more”.
I guess either they’re misinformed or you are :-)
It still requires a mental effort to make sure your information is not linked. One small mistake (e.g. visit site in wrong browser window) and all your previous effort is wasted.
Therefore, we need not only technical solutions. We need companies to change. Perhaps by an update of the law (GDPR for US), and if this doesn't work then perhaps we should even consider a ban on personalized advertising to make sure that these companies have no incentive to trick the user into disclosing personal information.
Although it would be helpful for some if Google laid it out transparently to individuals who do not have the technical slop to understand what they are "losing"
I will say a brand new iPhone 8 is also currently $599 (and the 7s is even cheaper) and will likely get updates for the next 4 years or so.
I've used Android since the original Android phone (T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream). It felt hypocritical, however, to have switched away from most of Google in my personal life and still give them access to me through my phone. I dislike Apple for many reasons, but I'd much rather deal with those issues than continue to use Google.
My paranoid side makes me wonder if all the fan activity is because it's so busy phoning home all the time 'sharing data'?
Their revenue growth has outpaced user/activity growth for some time.
Google always had a CIA connection. You do the math on how this works and what it means now that you can see it all unfolding like everyone else can. They want total control over your mind and barring that, they want total control over your behavior one way or another.
What can't corporations do? They can't force people to buy their products or pay their bills. Governments can, though. It's actually the only tool in the box. Corporations would love to gather and coalesce the information and then have the jackboots do the violent stuff to suppress and subjugate. The very definition of fascism.
https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/
Search "In-Q-Tel Google" for more.
If articles like these are the basis for your conclusions, really take a step back. I went down this route a little some years ago, and really just felt miserable for no good reason.
Now the next part of my suggestion is going to sound rough for a second, but please take it seriously. Check out a book called "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson. After reading (it's a really good book, and helped me a lot in avoiding this sort of stuff), watch a ridiculous conspiracy show on TV. My favorite recently was about whether mermaids were real.
Listen to the techniques they use in there -- By saying "A relates to B" and "B relates to C", they ask "Does A relate to C?" Even though A and B relate only through something remote, and similarly for B and C. But, imply a conspiracy and suddenly the remote links seem like a cabal of some sort. It's a manipulative practice to get eyeballs and clicks, and we have to identify it as toxic before we start taking it in.
Previously, you could be logged in in the browser but not into Google's website, or logged into Google's website but not into the browser. That was confusing for users ("It's asking me to log in to Google? But I'm logged in already. The hell?"). This change synchronized the login experience so if you're logged into Google, you're logged into the Chrome browser and you don't have to think about them separately. Users don't like logging in, so anything that can be done to safely minimize the amount of that necessary is seen as a user experience gain.
This position will secure them so long as we can find a use for data. And right now, data is something we use everywhere.
They can continue to use it for advertisement, or they can pivot or expand to new market, more nefarious or for the good of everybody. They could sell it to government for mass surveillance or they could use it to help scientist find a cure for a disease. We can always find a use for data.
So I think their goal is to hoard more and more data, and make it has accurate as possible. Google for me is neither a search engine company or an advertisement company anymore. Their core is data hoarding, and they make profit using this in several ways, advertisement being just one of them.
The closest thing I can think of almost feels regressive -- sites like HackerNews and Reddit. What I mean is asking a question there or searching for threads where other users have asked a similar question. Often the links provided in those threads are less likely to be provided by advertisers and actually just promoted by users. That's often where I find the best answers for things.
But to access those threads I still use Google or DDG because the Reddit search function is terrible.
Other options, like AOL Keywords (if you remember those) basically just directly link to paid providers.
I guess it's possible that there is a fair and balanced web crawler, but to give true freedom and not guide the user to specific the best option still seems to be a search engine.
Maybe the answer isn't alternative forms of searching but rather alternative ways to show the results? Right now they look like a ranking list. Maybe they could be displayed in a map or another form?
> By clicking “Agree,” you consent to Slate’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners to deliver relevant advertising on our site, in emails and across the Internet, to personalize content and perform site analytics. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information about our use of data, your rights, and how to withdraw consent.
I need to consent to have your website show me "relevant advertising across the Internet". If you can't take my privacy seriously, how should I take your concerns about Google and privacy seriously?
Unlike Samsonite, who I recently discovered set large number of cookies and make a bunch of third party requests before you click on Agree.
> If nothing else works, then at least I can vote with my feet—or my fingertips.
If they were serious about privacy they could not write for Slate or at least comment on how the very site we're reading this on also has major privacy issues.
In fairness, that sounds fairly reasonable. I don't know much about Slate (and the advertising consent makes me hesitant to click it), but if I'm an author wanting to write about privacy concerns, and I have Google publish me (be it by Blogger or some other medium), wouldn't my article feel a bit.. odd?
I'd be asking you to set aside your privacy concerns so you can read my post about why you should be concerned about privacy.
I'm not saying that's what's happening here, I'm not even clicking the article based on the silly terms. Yet, these comments make me feel it's similar in concept. Why should we step aside our privacy so we can discuss privacy? The content is on a less than stellar medium for privacy discussions, at the very least.
I don’t see how that follows. Even if the author were positively malicious, why would you ignore their concerns about privacy, which affect you and everyone else? It’s a non-sequitur.
The title is a little misleading because it's not Google who choosing this balance between privacy and convenience. We, the users, are making this choice. This is what concerns me.
If users choose privacy over convenience, Google would happily oblige. I'm confident of this seeing the way that the "organic" movement has taken hold.