Jumping out of a Google's bubble. It's more than just a matter of self-respect | Hacker News Reader

Jumping out of a Google's bubble. It's more than just a matter of self-respect

oleginspired.zecamp.com

65 pointsbehindai18 comments

4 years ago when I told my non-techy friends about the risk of using Facebook, Google, allowing full access to photos/camera/location etc, I was a tin foil hat man. I don’t blame them.

Today those same people are the ones discussing and raising their concerns.

I think privacy will be the next big selling point of any platform and there is already one company that figured it out; Apple.

You mean one company that figured out marketing that before the rest. Apple is no saint.

Fair point. I mean, they where mentioned in the Snowden leaks but they also dismissed it as being false.

I want that to be true and have decided to use them for now till something proves me otherwise.

edit: lazy was the wrong wording. I spent way more time that I should have, figuring out how to feel secure with my setup.

With lazy, I meant that I don’t have the time nor the motivation to set up my own cloud/mail/backup etc right now.

Can you point to any flagrant privacy abuses that Apple has engaged in when compared to companies like Facebook?

We can hope that Apple is just as ahead of the curve now as they were then. Apple may have figured out marketing, but let’s not equate that to selling you as a good to other corporations a and governments. There’s a lot I don’t like about their model. I think it’s completely Disingenuous to claim that Apple is paying the App Store developers, as opposed to users buying goods. However their privacy stance is something that should not be subject to whatBoutisms.

Apple does it because they can afford to do it not because they care.

I don't think Google is worse than Apple when it comes to privacy. Google has more of your information by nature of their products (search, recommendations, etc are incredibly personal). Apple sells you mostly non-cloud services, which have an inherently smaller attack surface in aggregate than what google offers in aggregate.

What's difficult about the whole situation is you're likely safer using google stuff than entrusting your data to 20 different small services / products that each need updates, each have their own EULAs, each have potentially different approaches to data protection and respecting user privacy. I tried going off google stuff before (owncloud + my own email server + etc etc) and the sheer amount of engineering maintenance needed to administrate it all is incredibly demanding.

The amount of stuff google has on me (e.g nest cams, email, browser, youtube, search, photos, android) is scary. But the benefits these things have for my daily life are high, and their stewardship of my data up to now has been really trustworthy. I use takeout to export my data a few times a year. My personal info? Found in a large number of dumps; from LinkedIn twice, from adobe once, from a myriad of retailers many times. If Google lost my data there would be a lot more blowback than "I guess I should just change my password and maybe my phone number..."

Google isn't incentivized to sell your data either because that removes their leverage. They're incentivized to _refer_ you correctly.

Unpopular opinion puffin: they've done a good job to let people opt-out of data collection, export their data, encrypt data at rest, patch security vulnerabilities actively, etc. There are few other companies I trust to take care of these things correctly.

Cloud-based products make our lives easier. Figuring out how to (enforceably) regulate them so that they can be safe for everyone and not misused is more impactful saying "we should do everything on our own devices." (Which is what apple mostly says, because they sell those devices.)

> Google use your personal data to put you in a bubble of your own interests. Creating illusion of objectivity, it narrows our perspective down and slows down the process of personal development.

I don't agree. People want this. Long before computers, let alone Google, people had no problem in absorbing themselves in themselves and their interests.

But, wait, really? Google uses my personal data to put me in a bubble of my own interests? A large chunk of the results for anything I search for are SEO-d garbage and many are irrelevant in other ways. That's supposed to be a bubble consisting of my interests?

Absolute, unadulterated nonsense. The Google spider identifies itself via HTTP headers. It's trivial to refuse service to specific clients.

Example log:

  66.249.79.219 - - [23/Jun/2019:15:36:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 66 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I could easily set up a filter to turn that into a 404 based on the request coming from Googlebot. Also note that it's accessing robots.txt. I don't have a link to that anywhere; it is spontaneously doing so; why would they if they had no intention of honoring the content.

I sometimes put private content on a URL to make it easily from somewhere. No links to it exist; you have to know the URL. I've never had such a thing accidentally indexed.

If people leave documents in searchable directories, don't use robots.txt and don't filter out the Google indexer, they shouldn't be surprised if those documents end up indexed.

> Google ignores websites privacy. Even if the website owner doesn't want to expose any content for search engines, Google will come, get it, and show it on its search results and will make money off it. Absolute, unadulterated nonsense. The Google spider identifies itself via HTTP headers. It's trivial to refuse service to specific clients.

Google spider ignores rules in robots.txt and show results from closed directories. I could write a distinct article about how we fight against it.

If that is so why does the indexer bother fetching these files at all? It's a waste of bandwidth and cycles to be doing this extra fetch of robots.txt for countless sites.

Kidding me? The average size of robots.txt is 500 bytes for one web site! Average web page size is 2Mb. So if a crawler respectfully downloads a robots.txt it could significantly save more bandwidth not downloading protected pages.

I'm still in the (long) process of de-Googling my life.

Does anyone know of a list of addresses that I can plop I to my hosts file to block Big G's tracking on non-Google sites? Something that is updated regularly?

I don't know if there is a list out of the box, but pi-hole is probably the right choice.

Privacy Badger by EFF should do the trick. On top of that I can recommend Firefox + uMatrix.

If you want DNS-based, Pi-Hole indeed. If you want hosts based you're going to have to modify that manually (AFAIK, there are probably managers which auto update it for your OS). DNS-based is going to be network-wide, including Android TV or your wife's smartphone or... you get the idea. I got my DNS server available via WireGuard VPN. It also does DNS over TLS which adds security.

Put Google in its own Firefox Container via Google Container extension.

You still need some other measures to avoid tracking and fingerprinting. Using these will increase the amount of capcha's you're going to have to solve. I can think of e.g. CanvasBlocker, and setting privacy.resistFingerprinting to true.

There's also a Firefox extension which removes UTM from URLs. That would be Tracking Token Stripper. Not sure about avoiding AMP.

There's no real point in using a hostfile to block much of anything these days.

It will be something you constantly have to fiddle with - especially if you do it at a network level (PiHole) and share a home with other people.

IMHO, just stop using Google services and use Ublock Origin on Firefox (desktop and mobile) to block Google trackers, and try to prefer websites to apps.

ProtonMail for encrypted at rest, and E2EE to other protonmail users, mail.

Etesync for E2EE contacts and cal.

StandardNotes for E2EE notes

Tresorit for E2EE "drive"

Wire and/or Signal for E2EE messaging.

Firefox for a browser.

DuckduckGo for Search.

I'd like to completely de-Google but the thing is that I have sites that run AdSense and I'm happy with it. Not that I wouldn't mind for a viable alternative.

Anybody know why this fell off the front page so quickly?

A massive pro-Google bias.

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