Unplug From Google | Hacker News Reader

Unplug From Google

slashgeek.net

40 pointspavs38 comments

"If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."

For me personally, this is the most stupid statement since the "war on terror" nonesense from a few years ago. The reason this is so stupid is because there are almost zero services that you do not pay for in order to use them, and Google makes none of these services.

I pay Google with ad impressions so I can use their search engine. Google can turn these ad impressions into money, so it is as good as dollars to them.

In order for me keep paying Google, they have to make sure I want to keep using the product. Just like any other subscription model.

It is also wrong that if you pay through ad impressions, you can expect less quality or service than if you pay money. There is no evidence that this is the case, and it makes no sense at all. There are plenty of cases where a company does not support an application after users payed for it, or customers complaining about bad support for products they spent money on.

Finally, you are never the "product being sold". First, that would be slavery and a crime. Second, I'm sitting here writing this with my free will, so obvisously nobody has sold me yet.

Google's first priority is still to get users to use their products and be happy with them. Just like it is with any other paid service out there.

that's very cool story, but I did not see anything like that in google terms of use: "we provide search, you click ads"

actually it's more like: "we provide search, all informations about you belong to us!"

so "customer" is not the most appropiate word here, how about "slave"?

How about "person who consciously chooses to use Google's website." You don't have to use Google. You don't "own" information you freely give to people.

Okay, but you're addressing only the ideal scenario of beneficially matching buyer and seller, where the product user is buffered by (honest broker) Google and thus not yet revealed to the advertiser.

But once you cross over (via clicking), whatever fraction of your digital identity is effectively sold to third parties who keep packaging your identity further upstream, in very durable ways.

Now you exist in many data warehouses, who are eventually integrating the various fractional identities into a good picture. And it is no longer hypothetical to have those identities connected to your real identity. I do believe Google is an honest broker but we have no reason to trust third parties.

Inspired by your reply: https://plus.google.com/115308028547191805295/posts/TSpjqpVY...

Just today I decided to move a lot of my self-hosted stuff to Google, via Google Apps (so I will be paying after my free trial). For me it was always a trade off between how much of my free time I was willing to invest.

My self-hosted email was insecure (no SSL), noisy (no spam filtering), and occasionally difficult to use (I didn't set up a web interface, only IMAP). Furthermore, I've lost email due to my own incompetence/corner-cutting, such as bad distribution upgrades and failing to properly restart postfix. These are all things that I could solve, but that's also not free - it takes a large portion of my dwindling free time.

I also have a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 7 - the integration with other Google products on these devices is the lowest friction route to a very enjoyable experience.

I'm not happy with the amount of data Google have about me, but I'm happier with that than losing my free time and having a second job just to manage my own shit.

I've been paying for my Gmail access for a couple of years now, in the form of a Google Apps account, works great. Part of me want to self-host, but the gmail.com client and their spam filters and priority inbox (good for removing marketing mails etc) keeps me 100% happy.

> ... and that website has analytics (Google Analytics) ...

Or Google Fonts. Or Google-hosted Javascript code. Or Google+ icon. Or god knows what else they just throw out there so that it would get inserted into people's websites and be pinging back. Whatever it takes, take it, take it all for free, just ping us back, damn it.

Ahem, yeah. That was the rant part.

The rational comment would be that the biggest problem unplugging from Google is other people's use of Gmail. You can evade Google all you want, but when you email someone at john@smith.com and it ends up being a Gmail alias, they got you, with all your email headers.

Far as I can tell, Google is actually trying to move away from the 'we sell adverts' business model currently. In the case of Android, they don't give away their gmail/market/maps, but charge a fee for them. With the purchase of Motorola, it hints that Google will be selling hardware in future. Google's push into driverless cars will also be in the form of a percentage of car cost (apparently). It looks like Google Glass will be a sold product and not sponsored by adverts as well.

So I'm guessing Google understands the problem here as well as anybody.

All that really says is that even Google has a problem monetizing directly on Android.

Google has a service that shows you some of what they know about you. Last time I checked they were WAY off the mark about me, and I use Google products for nearly everything.

Aside from that, I'm not really sure why I should be offended about being given more relevant ads. Being advertised to doesn't annoy me when I actually want the thing being advertised. A very well targeted ad would tell me about a product I want that I didn't know was available. I'm happy when I get an email from Valve letting me know that a Steam sale has begun because I really love their service.

On the other hand, I sometimes get ads for booze (probably because I'm a 29 year old male) despite the fact that I don't drink. I get ads for religious groups (probably because I frequent atheism sites) which I have zero interest in. Those are badly targeted ads that annoy me.

Aside from political dissidents under oppressive regimes, I don't see much reason for people to worry about someone trying to figure out what you like. Every time I meet some tech savvy developer who only uses a Linux distro he built himself to avoid government spying, runs all his phone calls through encryption software, and encrypts his entire hard drive on every device, I immediately wonder if he's a paranoid schizophrenic or has very illegal hobbies.

I know that sounds harsh, but it's what goes through my head. If you disagree then please enlighten me. Am I being dangerously nieve? What specific things should I be concerned about that I'm not? I'd appreciate links to news articles showing that you're talking about things that are actually happening and not just hypotheticals. I'm not worried about what-ifs.

> Aside from political dissidents under oppressive regimes, I don't see much reason for people to worry about someone trying to figure out what you like

I don't share the Google paranoia but It's not about what you like or don't like. It's more a profile of you. That means Google is (in theory) able to identify to a certain degree if you are sick, if you have problems with the law or any other other personal trait that may be problematic. Your insurance company would probably like to know about this. Your employer would also like to know about it. I'm certain that Google won't share this data but others might do.

> Every time I meet some tech savvy developer who only uses a Linux distro he built himself to avoid government spying, runs all his phone calls through encryption software, and encrypts his entire hard drive on every device, I immediately wonder if he's a paranoid schizophrenic or has very illegal hobbies.

That is a slightly rephrased variant of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry". And it's unrelated to Google IMHO, so I'll talk only about encryption here:

It's not the government, it's also other companies. And it's great to have the possibility to encrypt your HDD and be anonymous.

You don't need to be in an oppressed country, look at Wikileaks, journalistic work, industrial espionage. There are lots of legit cases for encryption.

I'm doing freelance work, I have several root passwords on my hdd. For me it's logical to encrypt the drive. The only technical somewhat secure way to encrypt your drive is full disk encryption. I think my clients deserve that I'm not leaking their passwords when my laptop is stolen.

> Am I being dangerously nieve? What specific things should I be concerned about that I'm not?

If you are a company: Industrial espionage, malicious hackers, law enforcement

If you are a private citizen you probably want to control the data trails you leave. They can bite you have bitten numerous others.

You can e.g. easily create graphs of your social connections and cluster you based on these. You can then make assumptions about these clusters. That means your mobile provider knows where you are and were your connections are. Now when law enforcement decides to collect these data from a whole city the structure of your group is clear. You can identify influencing persons and concentrate on these.

This happens, last I checked activism was not illegal.

Sure, just as soon as everyone stops using Google Analytics to track users, and blogs stop using Google Adsense to monetise their websites....

The more they know about me, the better Google Now can get (and the less irrelevant ads I'll see).

The only real risk of privacy breach is if the US government subpoena the info, but that can happen to any US cloud supplier.

What are people so afraid of when Google shows them ads? And Google lets you manage your ad preferences and control your privacy settings. (You can also use adblock to block ads entirely.) Also, Google doesn't use all the sources of data it has access to, e.g. it doesn't use Site Analytics data to track you.

"TINSTAFL: There is no such thing as a free lunch."

It's "TANSTAFL" because it ain't "is;" it's "ain't." I hate being pedantic, and I ain't sure that I am. In any event, I won't apologize to the author - the internet is a harsh mistress.

It's TANSTAAFL , and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL lists http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TINSTAAFL as a valid alternative (not that I agree with that last alternative but you can't really fault the guy for using it if it is that widespread).

I would love to use a different email provider (I'd be prepared to pay up to 10$ a year for it), but it would need to be as fast and as good at searching and have at least as much space as gmail.

I'd like to be using a google docs alternative that was at least as performant and supported.

Other players are actually now catching up on search and maps, but even so, it's difficult to find products that are as good as google.

I was hoping this article was going to give me suggestions on how to 'unplug' but in fact it had a very low information content.

> 10$ a year

Woah, really? You must be really wealthy to shell out this much for an essential service.

Try this - say, someone would be willing to offer you free heating for your place, but in return they would install discreet cameras in every corner of the house and be scanning and retaining a copy of every piece of mail that goes in or out and every phone call. Moreover, they will not only record your life, but also that of your guests even if these people would've objected to that had they have known it's happening.

Would you take this offer? Rhetorical question.

I am sure Google make less than $10 a year out of my using gmail as it is and they can still offer the service they do.

Well, I'd let them install devices to track my heating usage. Just like I accept that Google, who is handling my email, will check that email for relevant content to display ads.

However, if Gmail was trying to access to other things that it wasn't associated with, we'd have a problem.

Sort of like your "rhetorical question."

Fine, replace "heating" with "mail services".

Would you be OK with letting a company to scan and retain a copy of every letter you sent and receive in exchange for being able to not use stamps? Bonus question - do you think your correspondents would be OK with it if they knew you had such arrangement?

Gmail is a webmail provider. They have to retain a copy of every email sent/received, or you would only be able to read them once. They have to scan email, because otherwise you couldn't search them.

It is easy to set up Gmail such that Google doesn't have access to the text content of your mail -- simply install a desktop mail client (e.g. Thunderbird) and enable encryption. But now you've essentially disabled every feature of Gmail except for being a dumb SMTP relay.

This is all fine and dandy (and obvious), but the point is that Google is not just a webmail provider. When someone switches to Gmail, it affects me, because it lets Google track and profile me that much better. Hence the original comment - "unplugging" from Google is basically impossible, because of the proliferation of Gmail use.

If you're sending someone an email, Google keeping track of "John Doe emails huhtenberg@whatever.com" is much less of a threat than all of the dozens of intermediate parties that will record your email indefinitely.

This would be a problem if GMail was the only means by which to contact people. It's not. You have a choice to use email.

The truth is, when you contact someone, you don't know what is happening to that information. Gmail, if anything, makes it more clear than most other means of communication.

> Would you be OK with letting a company to scan and retain a copy of every letter you sent and receive in exchange for being able to not use stamps?

Assuming there were some terms and conditions on who could access those letters, sure! In fact, if the additional benefit was they would weed out all the junk mail I get to only provide me things I'd be interested in, that's even better.

Of course, this also makes the assumption that their are still other means of communication (like phone). If the only means of communicating with me are through this service, then no.

> Do you think your correspondents would be OK with it if they knew you had such arrangement?

My correspondents? Yes. Yes I do. In fact, I believe most of them would want a service like that for themselves.

For things people wanted to send privately, they could pay to have it sent to me, like they can now.

So yes, I don't see a problem.

I ran a personal email server for years and I currently have a server I can run things on, so I can set up a passable system myself for next to nothing. However, it won't be as good as gmail for reliability, spam, speed of searching, integration with my android phone, etc.

The point isn't that a good email service has extremely high utility to me, it's that I have a large number of options with a cost of nearly free. That's why I wouldn't be prepared to pay a lot for it.

Not to mention the fact that I hate recurring costs.

I use lavabit. It's cheaper than $10 a year and has a far superior web interface to googles. It uses squirrel mail.

Thanks for the suggestion. How fast is the web interface? How good is the search?

No unicode support in web interface and for some people I know this is instantfail.

And more importantly it is a market opportunity.

Yes, Google permeates most peoples online lives with the pervasive services. But at the moment the compromise between ease of use,free service with seeming integration beats the privacy.At least google is seemingly better with privacy than others.

The only service of Google's that I use is Reader, and that solely as a backend to Reeder. I would love to unplug entirely, so I'm hoping that Google messes Reader up to the point that third-party RSS clients will have no choice but to switch.

Eh, I like Google services. I use a Google Apps domain. I used to run everything myself on a co-located server, sharing back-up DNS and MX duties with friends doing the same.

Using Google services is so much better. Not only in terms of me not spending time actively managing it, but also in terms of reliability, performance and feature set.

Did anyone else see this as a piece of satire? Granted you had to read to the end for the punchline.

Ironically, this page loads jQuery from googleapis.com.

For me, even if I hated Google --which, unlike the author of TFA-- I don't, I'd still kinda like them because it's often interesting to make the ennemy of my ennemy stronger.

I'm an "abm": "Anything But Microsoft" and I do firmly believe that the day MS produce something that doesn't suck it's going to be a vacuum cleaner. And at one point the future looked bleak: Windows at something like 97% market share and some crappy IE version was slowing down the Web -- and slowing technology as a whole (the story of MS).

I'm very happy that we know have to gigantic players: Apple and Google, giving MS quite some headaches.

The last thing I'd want would be Google or Apple to sink and see MS reign king again.

So to all the Google-haters out there (and they sure seem numerous on HN): be careful what you're asking for...

The past was bad. I don't think anyone really want to go back to that dark past.

Much of Google senior management is Microsoft veterans running Microsoft style business units, so be careful what you wish for. Don't live in the 90s forever.

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