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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things.

Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general). There has been several discussions about this on HN, and otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their privacy claims. FastMail seems to be the worst of all. Migadu seems to be good but an extremely bad value for your $.

Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services. Don't let any marketing fool you.

I'd rather be in iron clad hands of Google's engineering and security practices than a 30 people company with no fricking clue about security. This is often not part of the discussion.

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Office 365 (or Microsoft 365 or whatever they want to call it today) is also good value. ~$5/month gives you more or less the same as Google where it comes to email/calendar and 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. It can go even cheaper at ~$2/month for just basic email (on the "Kiosk" plan) if you don't need cloud storage and just need hosted e-mail.

Regarding your counterpoint, I disagree. It's not about ProtonMail claims of encryption or security or anything, it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail services and not advertising, and they have no incentive (nor the technical expertise in-house) to read your e-mails for advertising purposes. Furthermore, ProtonMail and all these other services only get a part of your data, so even if they do use your data nefariously, it's better for each one to misuse a separate chunk of it than for one entity to have all of it.

> it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail services

Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?

Another counterpoint to my original post is - you can call someone at ProtonMail, can't do that with Google.

> Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?

Yes. If you read the terms when you sign up to pay them money for GSuite, it says that your data in not used for advertising, targeting, or any other analytics. Basically the minimum terms for a large organization to be willing to entrust their internal data to Google.

> Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?

Yes, the GSuite data is separated from non-GSuite and is goverened by a different ToS. This includes this data not being used for advertising, conforming to different deletion requirements and more. Check out the GSuite ToS for details, we looked into this awhile ago.

> Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?

Officially, I'm sure they claim that G-Suite data is not used for any advertising purposes. However, just like I wouldn't trust an alcoholic with guarding a warehouse full of booze, I wouldn't trust this promise especially considering they intentionally violate the GDPR with a misleading, obnoxious and non-compliant consent form for EU visitors.

Furthermore, even if we assume G-Suite data itself is not used, what about general data collected by Google services? For example, a lot of their properties have Google Analytics included - does being logged in a G-Suite account automatically opt you out? What about YouTube (when logging into a G-Suite account you briefly get a redirect to accounts.youtube.com presumably to set a session cookie)? Etc. Given that Google is an advertising company, I can see it being easy for them to collect data they shouldn't, even because of an oversight (such as forgetting a "if account.is_g_suite" check, or legacy code predating G-Suite) as opposed to any malicious intent.

Not using Google means you don't have to interact with Google at all unless you explicitly want to and aren't exposed to any of the aforementioned risks.

Agree. It is unlikely that google adheres to their ToS, it is more profitable to violate them and if you get caught do the usual "oops, our bad" like Facebook does regularly.

Then you can't trust, accept, or move to, any other company, either.

Saying folks that are privacy conscious 'deluded' is a bit of a stretch as well as assuming their reasons for deciding.

You list a bunch of services Google provide for that $5 and yes, no doubt you can extract good value if you want to use all those things, and also don't mind relinquishing privacy for the content you choose to put on there. FWIW Gsuite is more like $7/m where I am.

For me personally, you can list those bunch of things and gmail is the only really useful, day to day tool - mainly because their spam filtering is better than most. Essentially that's where the only value is, for me.

Also bear in mind Google's history of retiring products, hardly 'iron clad' reliability.

For me, their lack of privacy ethos compounds the problem of them having a monopoly on search, and to a large extent information discovery. That, alongside their huge reach in how they can gather information on people to aid advertising, via Chrome, Android, DNS, analytics... that huge list. Sleep walking into a society where a handful of large corps know everything about you isn't necessary.

How much do you value your online life ? Put all your eggs in one basket and you allow yourself to be locked away from it at the whim of some unknown algorithm, with practically no recourse. A strike on your account (maybe a Play Store upload or some vague TOS violation) and you may be locked out of your mail and the auth that you use for everything. You'll end up adapting your behavior, consciously or not, to avoid angering the giant. Spreading the risks, and taking back control, seems the level-headed thing to do.

And the concept that there is only a single company in the world that knows a thing about security seems deluded to me.

This comment should not be this highly rated on Hacker News. The entire content of this comment is: I read a bunch of stuff somewhere that said all these alternative companies are bad.

There are no links to sources, there's no evidence presented, there's nothing to dispute. There's no substance to this comment.

Hacker News has a bias towards Google because Google offers a bunch of services for free that are useful to HN's audience, so HN users would rather not have reasons not to use Google services, which is why comments like this get upvoted, despite their lack of substance.

> Hacker News has a bias towards Google

There are multiple threads every single week that get hundreds of upvotes for criticizing Google. I think Hacker News is heterogeneous enough on this that "bias towards Google" is an overstatement.

Fair point. I can’t edit the comment anymore, but if I could I’d say some HN users are bias.

> Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things.
...

> Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services. Don't let any marketing fool you.

You also don't get any useful customer service for that $5. I know companies that charge less but provide customer service. So what you value isn't what others may value.

That's one of the drawbacks of Google in general. I think if you want to buy Ads and have a big account with them, perhaps you can talk to a human.

Also if you are a big cloud customer.

I know, I consulted for one.

That said, it wasn't reliable.

One day: two sw engineers onsite, we recreated the problem, they went back to yake care of it.

Another day: what seemed like a student from a third world country on a very cheap helpdesk asking irrelevant questions instead of reading the description.

Another day again: answer by "head of <something>" acknowledging the issue and pointing to a fix coming <at some specified time>, only IIRC the fix didn't arrive, at least not at the time that person said.

> Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's marketing and you're falling for it.

At the very least, if you use providers other than Google, you can decentralize it. You can give one company your search history and a different company your emails. Even if both companies are equal to Google in terms of privacy, you still end up with better overall privacy because tehy can't join the two datasets.

> ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general).

Can you back that up with some references? I live in Switzerland and Swiss data protection law is certainly better than American.

I’m not sure why wtmt_arn‘s comment is dead... it’s correct

You forgot how they'll also helpfully remove services that you could otherwise end up spending your valuable time on:

- Reader, possibly to make room for Google+

- and then Google+

- etc

You also forgot how they'll ban you from accessing your own paid account, and there won't even be a sham trial or even a kangaroo court, just an automatic death sentence for your data.

Seriously: Google has earned the distrust they are now facing. They have dug this hole

- one shady tactic at a time

- one let down at a time

- one deal with China at a time

- etc

until even former fan boys like me become happy every time I see Google in hot water.

@Googlers: nothing against most of you as individuals. Hope you get well paid and good jobs when Google has to cut. (Except those who think it is OK to use search as a playground for wacky AI experiments, those who implement rules to punish logged in Firefox users with Captchas etc :-)

Or people are just sick of being shown ads on everything Google. Sure $5 you get X, Y, Z but you also get 000's of ads pumped at you constantly. Even though you pay for that access you are pretty much opening up all of your inboxes etc for crawlers to scan for your likes, dislikes etc.

GSuite subscription excludes you from most of it, to be fair.

I would to believe this but after spending many years of with SEO and PPC it just doesn't matter if they do to be fair. One way or another your GSuite account is linked to your personal account and that's where things get back on track for the big G and their data.

My reason for not using google services goes beyond privacy. I also do not want to contribute to or reward Google’s monopoly practices

> ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy

Customer here. What have I missed?

> Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded.

This is the kind of nonsense comment that ends up being used as the moral justification engineers need to build these privacy invading services.

People are entitled to their own privacy, end of story.

This is the most deluded and blatantly incorrect comment I've seen on HackerNews to date.

What's so wrong with FastMail?

They're presumably concerned about FastMail being in/from Australia.

The thing is, if you're concerned about a state agency, you have bigger issues. If all you're after is "I don't want to give Google my money", FastMail is pretty good - and to boot they're one of the few with a still working push notification certificate for Mac Mail.app users, I believe.

Email is a lost cause. Just choose the one that sucks the least, and don't do important things on it.

> don't do important things on it.

How do you accomplish that? In my experience every single service on the internet relies on email for account creation, password recovery and general identity verification.

I'm not saying that's good, only that it's the current state of affairs.

I'm rolling my eyes at your comment. Come on now, you know what I meant.

Email is like getting mail in your postal box. It has no real protections except for people saying "yeah, I won't read your mail". Thus, if something is important enough, don't use it for that.

If you really need to do something privately there are better equipped avenues; if you're worried about tracking, it doesn't matter because

- any service mailing you will try to track you

- if you email with anybody from Google/MSFT/etc, your email is on their servers anyway.

It's a lost cause. It has been for some time. Keep a strong password on it and 2FA and such, but otherwise, it's not worth the time to care about.

Right, so don't do important things on the internet. Good advice in general.

Some info here: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...

There was another highly voted post on HN that compared all services (except Migadu) just last month, I can't find it.

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