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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer. This makes me comfortable with our relationship. I don't really care about Ping or app store approval policies, so, meh...

With Google, I can see their ability to become a shady company pretty easily, but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines. Bing isn't so bad you know.

But Facebook knows so much about me, and the network effects are so strong -- this is the company I feel most unpleasantly stuck to. Not "Comcast stuck" mind you, but still, more "stuck" than I'd like. It's like my friends keep having parties at a bar I'm not super fond of... and I keep going.

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> but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines.

and personal email, and collaboration tools, and project mailing lists, and photo service, and maps service, and video hosting..

If you consider google as the search engine maybe not, but if you consider google the company the it's downright scary how hard it would be to get out of their grasp, IMO.

I don't think it would be that hard. You're one MX record change away from changing your mailhost without anyone ever knowing. You can continue using your gmail.com address without ever seeing ads by connecting with IMAP. You can get maps from anywhere, including Open Street Map. You can move your photos from Picassa to your own machine and to Flickr, if you desire. Google Chat is XMPP, so you can get a new "chat provider" and still talk to all your old contacts.

People use Google's services because they're excellent, not because they are locked in. Google makes it very easy to leave and take your data with you. Google contributes as much of their internal software to the Free Software community as they can. They do need to make money, but they're trying to do it the old fashioned way: make products people they like. And that's refreshing in a world where Microsoft makes their own email protocol and Apple sells computers that you can't hack.

This is not "downright scary". It's downright refreshing.

(Yes, advertising is an annoying business model, but I don't think it will last much longer for Google. People hate advertising and the feeling of being "told what to think". The good news is that Google's products will still work even if you have to pay a few bucks a month for them. Right now, that's not in Google's interests, because advertising money is the easiest money to make. But in a few years, I think we'll see less advertising and more customer focus, as advertisers realize that nobody wants their overpriced shit anymore.)

This. Unfortunately I don't entirely share your optimistic sentiment regarding Google's intentions and potential for misuse of trust. The big plus with Google is that, by and large, they make it pretty easy for your to take your ball and go. If I want to switch mail providers, it's pretty easy to get all my emails and contacts off of GMail.

The mail host is the least I'd worry about. Migrating the mail archive is much more important. Furthermore Gmail's user interface beats anything else hands down, it's too hard to say goodbye to it.

Nothing very hard about migrating all your mail off Gmail via the IMAP interface if you really want to.

Or via POP (getmail4's `getmail_fetch` is easy to use). I did this recently, exporting basically every Google service I use: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/WrCjcBXc...

I believe you are arguing against something I didn't posit. Google certainly has a lecit business and has gained success because of good products, and it's easy to "liberate" a lot of data.

My point was that while changing search engine is easy:

* migrating all your data is way harder

* opting out of some google online services (e.g. maps) does not free me from third parties relying on them (e.g. android, iphone)

* I can't change the habits of the rest of the world, so I'm stuck with them if I want to join ai-class.org, read something on blogger or peruse a project mailing list on groups.

* the fact that the services are good _is_ a lockin, as it makes it harder to get off of them

Just this. Changing search engine is easy, opting out of google's products is, at least for me, much much harder.

I love google the company and their products, it just seems nearly impossible to get out of their reach without resorting to RMS-style "I email myself web pages I want to read" estremisms.

So your complaint is that other people use Blogger blogs, so you can't opt out of Google? That's interesting, but it seems like what you really want is to opt out of tracking in general. Google tracks you, sure, but so do a bunch of shade-ball sites you've never heard of. Why would you trust a company you've never heard of over a company that actively lets you opt out of tracking and migrate away from their services?

I don't think you need to email yourself web pages, but I do think you need to use Tor or some other anonymous HTTP proxy. If you are paranoid about the "paper trail" that browsing the web leavers, then you need to take measures to make that paper trail less useful. Complaining about "lock in" to services that other people uses, though, is just confusing the issue; the Internet has never let you choose what service providers other people use, and you will have to live with that.

Google makes it very easy to leave and take your data with you. Google contributes as much of their internal software to the Free Software community as they can. They do need to make money, but they're trying to do it the old fashioned way: make products people they like.

Interesting, since I would say pretty much the same thing about Apple (certainly with the Mac platform).

So? Google is "bad" because they provide a lot of really good services that are also well integrated? How dare they!

I love Google but they're at least dangerous. The "bad" may come later.

Dangerous because it's easy for you to use their services and be happy? Why does that make Google dangerous? Even if you tout "lock in", I don't see how that makes them dangerous; it makes your dependence dangerous. Especially given the volume of data liberation/exportation tools they provide.

Dangerous: "Able or likely to cause harm or injury" [1]

Google is exactly that. I think you're reading too much into whats being said. Are you suggesting we shouldn't keep a watchful eye on Google? They have a tremendous amount of power.

1: http://www.google.com/search?q=define:%20dangerous

Their power is derived from your use of their services. You can quote the dictionary at me, but I simply don't understand this attitude.

It's like handing over money to a drug dealer in the back alley and going "I just don't know about you, you seem dangerous" and then coming back week after week. Stop using Google and they lose all power over you and the "danger" evaporates.

I'm not trying to have an attitude. I said it once but I'll say it again: You're reading too much into whats being said.

I like your analogy. It perfectly exemplifies what I'm trying to say. Can I not use their services and be careful while doing it? Driving my car is dangerous but I do it every day. I'm not trying to say that they're bad. If you're distilling the word "dangerous" down to it's connotation then I can understand your disagreement. Please understand that I'm not doing that.

>You're reading too much into whats being said.

After reading this last reply, I think I am. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that everyone is thinking about it in the same way you and I are. There are a lot of people (often even on HN) that decry new Google products or features as some sort of "attack". Have no doubt, they want and live on data and ad-intel, but that's just part of the game, at least to me (an informed consumer).

I know this is a meta-comment but I thought this was a wonderful exchange - a misunderstanding was explained clearly and respectfully and then acknowledged accordingly. A great example of the maturity of the readership here, which is refreshing to see for someone relatively new to HN. Kudos to you both.

Ask yourself - why is Google actively trying to become a major provider of webfonts?

They are hiring type designers left and right and pouring money into creating a wide variety fonts - both original and knock-offs. Fonts that then they are offering for free. The only connection between the webfont and Google's core business is the fact that a Google-hosted version of former needs to be embedded in one's website in order to be used. So, they are doing this - at least in part - in order to expand their tracking capabilities.

It's one thing when one joins G+ and decides to share most of his/her online life with Google. And it's another thing to embed a piece of JS/CSS and to start tracking other people on Google's behalf. Google is effectively exploiting the greed and ignorance of the web designers to go after people who do not want to have anything with them. This is plain unethical, but nonetheless Google is very aggressively pursuing this direction.

The same incidentally goes for Gmail. I was buying a piece of real estate not long ago, and the realtor was using Gmail. We are both in Canada. I told him that exchanging documents over an email was like sending faxes back and forth, but not forgetting to send a copy of each to some random US company (because it would make sending faxes free). Only then he realized that he was in violation of whatever privacy requirements his RE association had. The level of ignorance when it comes to online freebies is absolutely STAGGERING. Google knows that what they do online would've never flown in the real life, but they still merrily peddle their free services and constantly seek ways to go after those who don't want them. That's certainly not evil or bad. It is all "well integrated", so it must be benign.

/rant

I'm glad you ended it with rant, because this is the exact brand of FUD I was referring to.

>The only connection between the webfont and Google's core business is the fact that a Google-hosted version of former needs to be embedded in one's website in order to be used.

All of those fonts are freely downloadable. Nothing about them requires you to go through Google (and is in fact impossible due to how webfonts work).

Further, do you have ANY evidence that G+ is tracking non-loged in users?

Also, I'm pretty sure the privacy policy of... ANY webmail client (save for self or ISP hosted) is going to violate such a policy, and I still find it completely irrelevant in a discussion of Google being dangerous.

Now they're dangerous because you didn't read the TOS?

I heard Google breaks into people's houses at night and steals any spare change the occupants have lying around. This makes sense because Google must maximize shareholder value, and spare change is money for the shareholders. Therefore, this accusation must be true.

Next week: proof why Google enriches uranium and sells it to terrorists trying to build a dirty bomb. One reason: they would get money from doing so! Man that's evil!

> All of those fonts are freely downloadable

In exactly one format. And in order for them to be properly served to different browsers, they need to come in at least 3 other formats. Doing offline conversion yields fonts that look noticeably different from those served by Google, so for all practical intents and purposes having these fonts available for download is useless.

> Now they're dangerous because you didn't read the TOS?

They are dangerous because the other guy didn't read the TOS. I read them and declined.

Google just doesn't behave like this. I've talked to many people that work there (and I will be one of them soon), and this is just not the culture. Google maintains webfonts because someone said, "hey, our products would be better if they didn't look like shit on certain machines". Someone else agreed and now they have their own fonts.

(Part of Android's look-and-feel is based on fonts, too, so it makes sense that if you're going to hire designers to make their phone OS look nice, some fonts are going to get designed along with that. Fonts, icons, backgrounds, and UI layout are all the same thing.)

Before this, Microsoft provided the standard web fonts. They made them very hard to install, and so Google stepped up to provide a standard set of fonts, free to use and modify. This isn't evil, it's just Google ensuring that people can use their products. Bad fonts means their sites look ugly, and ugly sites means users won't use them. That's the only motivation.

This is my experience as well, a friend of mine worked with the web fonts team and this matches the motivations he expressed to me regarding the project.

They have 393 fonts as of today. Don't you think it's a bit excessive for sprucing up their own products? Also, considering a milder version of "don't be evil" angle - they are effectively on a route to nuke paid online typeface services or render them economically unfeasible to a vast majority of foundries. A policy not very much unlike Microsoft's when they were undercutting superior products and pushing them off the market.

With regards to the "just doesn't behave like this" - Google is not a charity. It might be a wealthy company, but even it needs a justification for spending hundreds of thousands if (not millions) on creating a font library. Do you seriously think "let's have fonts" is the justification enough for that? There has to be a bigger reason and a larger picture. The "culture" is a funny thing. It can be benign and ethical all the way through the organization with an exception of a single room where the lawful interception provisions are enforced.

> That's the only motivation.

Right.

Yes, this is bad for companies that sell fonts. But selling fonts never made sense for the Web; even if a designer buys a font, the end-user still needs to own the font the designer specified. Paying for fonts would mean that every web user would have to buy several fonts for every web page they visited, which is not something they would do.

It's good for the openness of the Web when fonts are available freely, and Google only makes money when the Web can be open. So they give away fonts.

(They also bought VP7 and open-source many of their internal projects for this reason. They want to send a message: compete on an open playing field or become irrelevant.)

But then Google has a very active engineering team, the Data Liberation Front, whose goal is: "[...] to make it easier to move data in and out."

http://www.dataliberation.org/

These are the products you can easily export: AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Business, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Bookmarks, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Google Storage for Developers, Health, iGoogle, Latitude, Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Project Hosting, Reader, Sites, Voice, Web History, YouTube

And via "Google Takeout" you can export all of these products in one go: Buzz, Contacts, Google+ Stream, Picasa Web Albums, Profiles

I think there's plenty of competitors for all of those products if you wanted to move.

App Store policies restrict what I can put on my own device. I do care about that.

Switching search engines seems pointless as they all have the same business model (maybe duckduckgo is different), but blocking all the tracking and analytics stuff solves this problem.

Facebook isn't a huge problem for me either. I basically use it in read only mode, blocking them on all third party sites.

> App Store policies restrict what I can put on my own device. I do care about that.

IMHO I think that's a wrong affirmation. They restrict what developer can sell through their platform. Big different. You could then complain about not allowing not approved apps on the device, but it would be like saying that Playstation or Xbox limit your freedom by not allowing Super Mario Kart run on their consoles.

They restrict what developers can distribute via the App Store, at the same time mandating that the App Store be the only distribution channel. That amounts to restricting what I can install on my device (short of jailbreaking).

I'm not sure I understand your Super Mario example. You seem to suggest that it's perfectly normal to face such restrictions. I can assure you it's not normal for me and I'm not going to put up with it.

They do. Game consoles were the beginning of this slippery slope. Now we are at phones. Personal computers seem to be next. This is worrisome and it was worrisome before the iPhone was even a twinkle in anybody's eye.

The problem with Google is you get tracked even if you don't use any of their services. Almost every single web page has one of Google Adsense, Analytics, Maps, ... all of which can build up a profile about you. To a degree this same effect is happening with FB as more and more sites add like buttons, though they remain less common than Google's array of libraries.

Does Google have a look at Google Analytics? I thought it was only for the webmasters who set it up and that Google did not touch it.

It is nearly their only service that I haven't blocked (with the libraries available on their CDN).

The issue is they have the potential to do it.

Once the potential is there and you have people motivated by performance targets, stock price, etc it's very difficult to permanently resist the temptation.

If you are really paranoid you could mirror their cdn libraries and rewrite the urls, as they could be used as fairly poor info too...

Here's what Google says about analytics:

Website owners that use Google Analytics have control over what data they allow Google to use. They can decide if they want Google to use this data or not by using the Google Analytics Data Sharing Options. When these options allow, the data is used to improve Google products and services. Website owners can change these options at anytime. http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html...

Since I have no control over it, I block Google analytics.

Your link has this : http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en

Am I supposed to install an opt-out plugin for every single tracking service in the world? There are hundereds of those, and asking each of them to voluntarily stop tracking me makes no sense.

At least, there's still an opt out =/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-tar...

http://www.ghostery.com/
It's a serious problem, though in this instance it's hardly Google's fault. I doubt Ghostery turns me into an internet specter, but at least I know I'm not pinging Facebook's, Google's, and God-knows-who-else's beacons whenever I open a web-page.

I'm deleting my facebook account tomorrow. I dumped all my data already and gave notice to my friends.
I'd rather be cut-off than have to pay their price; they've proven time and time again how little regard they have for your privacy. Every slight change facebook makes means re-evaluating all of the privacy settings and other configurations to re-assess what extra information is being leaked without warning or approval.

I understand your point. But it has never bothered me (so far) because I've never posted anything on Facebook that I want private. I do things there with the full expectation that someone will be able to see it if they really want to. I also treat Dropbox the same way.
That said, I've also been toying with the idea of removing my FB account - just because I'm bored with it.

With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer.
I believe the party line is "I'm not the product being sold".
but it is just too damn easy to switch search engines.
Or, you know, run an ad-blocker - much easier than jailbreaking a phone and Google Search/Gmail will continue to work well with an ad-blocker running, even if they upgrade the site.

"""Or, you know, run an ad-blocker - much easier than jailbreaking a phone and Google Search/Gmail will continue to work well with an ad-blocker running, even if they upgrade the site.""
Actually, no, Google would stop business if people used ad-blockers en masse. So that's just something that works because few people do it.
And it's not like Google is gonna decide where they want to go their services, changes, etc, with you and not the marketer's benefit in mind.
So, even if you use ad-block, you're still the product being sold (to be exact: you're just a lost sale).
You can't escape that, unless you actually pay the company whose services you use.

Well, that wasn't exactly the point I was trying to make.
My point: The downside of Google products is having to look at their ads. The downside of Apple products is getting locked-in to their restricted platform.
You can sidestep Google's downside with an ad-blocker. You can sidestep Apple's downside with a jail break.
It's easier to run that ad-blocker (heck, you can even get it from Google's own store) and keep it running than it is to perform a jail break and keep that updated.
As an aside - just like a lot of people aren't offended by the restrictions Apple places on its platform, a lot of people are not offended by Google's ads. In fact, I bet there's a very significant overlap in those two groups.

With Apple, I'm the customer, not a marketer.
Are you sure about that? Apple "sells you" as a user that will buy apps on the app store, and they take 30% of the developer's profit for that privilege. Whenever Apple can, they advertise how their users buy more apps than Android users, and bill this as a reason for developing for iOS and not some other mobile platform.
You are a product.

That's a stretch. It's simpler than that: follow the money. I pay Apple, so I'm the customer. Advertisers and marketers pay Google for access to me, so they're the customer.
Just because Apple touts their user numbers doesn't mean they're selling those users. In fact, as a developer, I can't pay Apple to guarantee installs, or even visibility. Apple won't sell me customers. I might like to give Apple money to get leads or users for my apps, but Apple will not do that.

With google i feel like a data funnel, that's true. But with apple i feel like a money funnel. Apple always manages to make me spend more than expected. Their products are deliberately engineered to make it painful to seek affordable alternatives when you need new parts.

Can you give any examples of this? You may be over-generalizing. Most of their products don't even have replaceable parts. Are you sure their reasons aren't legitimate?

RAM from Apple is certainly expensive enough that almost no one recommends it. They also tend to nickle-and-dime you on accessories like converter cables.

"Their products are deliberately engineered to make it painful to seek affordable alternatives when you need new parts."
Some of apples products have RAM directly soldered to the motherboard. This has legitimate engineering trade-offs. Of the ones that don't do this: Are there any that deliberately void compatibility with alternatives. It looks like most of their cables have alternatives too. Their stuff is expensive sure. But are they deliberately locking you into using their accessories?

Yes, sorry - I missed that part of the point. You can get usually get cheaper alternative accessories.

So basically, you are griping because Apple hasn't chosen to be a mass seller of RAM upgrades who keeps large stocks and is willing to sell it for very small profit margins.
Heard of damning with faint praise? I'd say this amounts to praising with faint damn.

Whatever. I was just pointing out that Apple sells things that are much more expensive than what you get elsewhere. If you choose to read more into it than that, then go ahead and knock yourself out.

They also sell things, like the Macbook Air or iPad, that are much less expensive than what you get elsewhere (when you try to get an equivalently spec'd device).
Given that their devices cost less, I can forgive them the convenience cost of an in-store RAM upgrade when they're helping my Mom upgrade RAM or HDD in her beloved 15" Macbook from years ago that still works a treat. Most customers are not really the NewEgg type.
To grandparent's point about costs of low turnover stock, these parts cost more for much better reasons than Jiffy Lube oil costs more, yet most people prefer Jiffy Lube except mechanics or DIYers.

They also sell things, like the Macbook Air or iPad, that are much less expensive than what you get elsewhere (when you try to get an equivalently spec'd device).
Perhaps this is true in America but I'm pretty sure it's not in many other places. I recently looked around for a laptop to put Windows7 on and while it was discouraging to see the quality of the laptops that were available (compared, not just to a MacBook but to other laptops that existed 3 years ago) they were significantly cheaper and higher spec'd than a MacBook.

but the RAM is just plain old laptop RAM. You can buy it from anywhere.
Similar to the external hard drive market, anything labeled "apple compatible" costs extra, but is basically the same thing.
Find the RAM you machine needs, and search for that directly on Newegg or similar.
How to find what RAM you need: (on OSX Lion)
1. Click the Apple (top left corner of your screen) 2. Click "About this Mac" 3. Click "More Info..." 4. Click the "Memory" tab
Note: there are memory upgrade instructions in this window as well :)

this will all change very soon. I think the product is almost done: http://mankabros.com/blogs/chairman/2011/03/26/manka-bros-to...

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