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Comment by thefourthchime | Hacker News Reader

I'm sympathetic to remove Apple and Google from my life, but this list looks so sad. You know the experience, integration and headache of all this is going to be horrible.

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Depends what you're looking to do - if you really value your privacy, yes, you're going to have to give up some convenience, but I can assure you, it's really not that bad if you put in a little work on an occasional basis, it's not the constant maintenance nightmare that some people seem to expect.

I fired up Syncthing on my phone and NAS and restic to perform encrypted backups nightly to B2, sure, you're not going to get some magical cloud image recognition stuff, but do you really need or even want it?

Everything can integrate quite nicely, but plan to do the connecting work yourself as a one-off with some occasional maintenance a few times a year.

I used to think that privacy arguments are ok in principle but we aren’t really loosing much by sharing some personal data with Apple or Google’s algorithms. In return we got so much convenience, software and products that worked well with each other and even shopping recommendations that were great.

But with this move, they have just crossed a huge threshold. Now it’s clear that we are hurtling into a truly dystopian future where our personal thoughts and experiences are simply not our own. America at least seems to be heading towards some form of corporate fascism that may not be dominated by an individual or a group, but will eventually lead to social ossification and societal decay by outlawing dissent.

To introduce this tech under the disguise of fighting child abuse is just amazing. This will eventually lead to identification of individuals who for example may hold sympathetic views for political views that are currently out of favour.

At some point you have to swallow the inconveniences outside the garden and recognise what this is leading to.

If you had the option of buying this hardware stack through an integrated third-party brand/storefront that offered support for the products and their integration would that make you feel differently?

That's an interesting idea. The amount of work even for a techie to maintain all this, is considerable. Could it be set up for a "user". Tech support, would be; Interesting.

I made an example storefront a few months ago and jotted down a plan in a bout of procrastination. I have a few thoughts on a pragmatic lazy (in the cs sense) approach.

If you or anyone one else is interested email me: ipodopt@pm.me

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