The real solution is to "Get off Google". If everyone reading this did that, would it impact them? No, they would be fine. But I think it's better to do something rather than nothing.
The problem, of course, is that incentives are misaligned and the company's purpose in collection and use is often different from the user's purpose. And the laws are still written to the service provider's purpose not the users' purpose. Its left to the company to align them.
I use Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps. Each has a perceptibly different balancing of those purposes.
As with climate change, systemic problems can't be solved with individual action.
I think people leave out the word “only” in statements like yours. Systemic problems can’t be solved with only individual action but the actions of many individuals can very much set examples, serve as encouragement to others, shift norms, and make the political space for regulated or coordinated action more available.
We should not exempt ourselves from individual action, especially when it is inconvenient, simply because our small change won’t single-handedly solve the whole problem. This goes for browsers, “free” email, privacy, and environmental impact.
Same from buying power. You can either buy from small business and make a difference for a family. Or you can keep shopping at big box stores. Sure it feels like a small impact, but this isn't small at all for the small business. Those things add up.
Dealing with a monopoly at an individual level is an exercise in futility.
Right now people are incentivized to use these "free" services because they feel like that's what is in their best interest. And to be honest, they are probably right in the current state of the world. I would be significantly worse off if I refused to use any Google services. I literally wouldn't be able to do my current job.
Making any type of change isn't going to come from us, but from regulators who force change.
It is not my purpose to change anyone's decision but mine. That alone is enough impact for me.
> I would be significantly worse off if I refused to use any Google services. I literally wouldn't be able to do my current job.
You have a tough choice indeed (I am in the same situation). But the choice is yours. And yours alone.
But they can certainly be improved.
Where by "Internet" I mean "running 3rd party code talking back to a server over a global network". One way is going back to the original WWW design of hyperlinked documents, removing cookies and javascript altogether. Tracking becomes limited to the set of hyperlinked documents accessed, which could be proxied by a 3rd party for anonymization purposes. However, there are a few downsides.
* No authentication to remote servers. Forget web email, shopping or banking. On the plus side, forget social media as well.
* No business model for content publishers.
* No rich web UIs, for example maps.
Is there a middle ground?
While it doesn't seem likely to be viable even for a single person (primarily because of the government and banking services), it sounds rather nice to me, and such a sentiment pops up here and there.
> No authentication to remote servers.
No certain types of custom authentication, but standard HTTP authentication doesn't require executing freshly loaded code. Even custom forms-based authentication doesn't require to do that, or to use cookies.
> No business model for content publishers.
This is probably meant to be exaggerated; surely there are content publisher business models not reliant on JS-powered advertisement (e.g., subscriptions, tracking-free advertisements, donations, perhaps merchandise).
> No rich web UIs, for example maps.
I find this example rather interesting: it's a common and old application of pushing the limits of web browsers, and a seemingly common example of the need to do so (perhaps because maps are useful to many people, and the need in a specialized UI for those is hardly controversial). But it also seems quite sensible to me to use a dedicated program (which doesn't run on top of a web browser, that is) for mapping.