My divorce from Google - One year later | Hacker News Reader

My divorce from Google - One year later

itworld.com

50 pointsangusgr63 comments

So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies? I trust google with my data more than I trust Facebook or LinkedIn or Microsoft.

Google runs their own ad network (and it's generally an honest and upstanding ad network, unlike some others). All that data they collect on you is for their own internal consumption. If they ever sell their data, they are giving their competitive advantage to their competitors - not going to happen. Other companies are also logging and collecting every scrap of data that they can, but they aren't consumers of that data. It just gets sold to the highest bidder. I'd much rather have google tracking me and know where that data is going, than have somebody else tracking me and never knowing where that data is going to end up.

generally an honest and upstanding ad network

Unless you happen to be a small guy and fall on the wrong side of their political beliefs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5438797

That's not their political beliefs, that's their lawyers making a risk vs reward decision. Why is everybody so quick to attribute things to malice when they can be explained by simple pragmatism?

s/politics/<reason_of_the_day>/

To me the point is that when you start arbitrarily enforcing rules against some people (small guys) and not others (big guys) it smacks of hypocrisy. Maybe you can explain how it was just blind process -- it still stinks.

If that's the case, then it's time for small businesses to take their business elsewhere. The problem is, what other options are there?

That is neither dishonest nor down standing, that is them annoyingly not doing business with someone.

Treating the big guy one way and the little guy another may be "pragmatic" but that's not upstanding in my book. Sure, it's within their rights to do business with whom they want, but it doesn't mean we can't call a double standard when we see one.

> So you've traded one big company for a bunch of other big companies?

That's neither fair nor accurate. Tom's running his own email server, which is a huge chunk of privacy right there.

Distributing your identity across multiple companies means, at the very least, they've got to do more work to create a unified profile of you. One of my major beefs against Google, and a reason why I separate my own use of the company's products among different (or no) identities and browsers is that its usage profile is drawn across such a wide range of products. Google knows my search, my social, my video viewing, my maps usage, my email reading habits, and more. That's ... fine until the regime changes ... or gets pissed off at me.

I've started thinking of ways in which the FreedomBox (plug-based cheap computers running Debian and largely self-configuring software tools) could take the place of most of the present generation of cloud computing. The compute power and raw storage are effectively trivial requirements to meet. Distributed storage for redundancy slightly harder, but still very doable. The real key is bringing down the configuration and management elements to the level that Joe and Jane Average Internet User can just plug and play. And I suspect it's not too far off. A few years, but not much more.

Whether or not people will buy into it is another matter, but as with Linux, if enough do, it won't matter, and even if this means that small hosted services exist, the idea of separating out and federalizing people's data would be an advantage over the present regime.

Reading his service-by-service comments paints a much less favorable picture of his Google "divorce":

Search: Push (possible win with DuckDuckGo booleans, possible loss with Craigslist search)

Mail: Push (mainly using own server, Yahoo vs Gmail not an issue).

Maps: Acceptable, but significant loss. ("Mapquest is ok. Yahoo! Maps are my go-to" and "Yahoo! Maps UI isn't very good, but the maps are quite usable").

Music and Videos: Loss. Spotify covers music, Vimeo and DuckDuckGo search covers some (most?) videos, but the overall process described is pretty painful. Many alternative video sites are likely tracking him as well (despite attempted countermeasures).

Images: Push. Happy using private Flickr and Shutterfly, no noted advantages.

Social Networking: Push. Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter (occasional) cover most things. No indication of whether or not he reasonably matched his 3000 Google+ relationships.

GPS: Not used.

Google Translation: Loss. "Babelfish is ok. Others do well, too. None are as good as I would like."

Apps: Not used / push.

So... depending on whether you break out Music and Videos and whether you count Apps, that's three clear losses out of 7-9 services, with no obvious win (other than the divorce itself). To me that doesn't look very good.

I find Here.com to be better than Google Maps FWIW. Outlook.com to be better than Gmail.

It's weird because product-for-product, Google has great web services but their issue is that so much of the UI is dedicated to advertising that it makes the overall experience worse. Here.com is owned by Nokia but there is no indication of that apart from a tiny copyright notice in the bottom left of the page.

I've love to try Here.com, however their home page isn't even rendering properly right now. They are serving a completely unstyled page that has totally broken their maps component. I can't even see a map on the page.. There is no style, and apparently no behavior attached to a white page with black text.

Is the internet trying to teach us a timely lesson with this broken site? :p (semi-tongue-in-cheek)

Hilarious, I was just using it before my previous post, continuous deployment fail?

looks to be back up :)

Seems pointless. Trading one hosted service with another doesn't really give your privacy back. You might be able to split your profile in different silos but what's the guarantee that the personal information won't be shared between the different service providers ?

What we need is a way to be able to sell server "apps" in a way where they can be monetized. Right now it's really hard to sell the application without providing the service as well because they're too hard to install.

I find the number of Google "so-what" apologists rather striking in this thread. Not saying the OP did it right or did the right thing, but as a life experiment, it seems honorable. Personally, I find Google's omni-presence a bit scary as well. I never adopted gmail (except as a throw-away address to sign up with HN and other websites :-). The other service OP didn't mention is Google Analytics: so I tell Google everything about my site, then I expect it to broker ads for me honestly?

In addition to the personal tracking, I really agree with the following quote from the OP:

"I find that Google and SEO and tracking have soiled the web in unbelievable ways. Google has imposed a constraint on content through its ad business that I can't get away from, because content is trying to adapt to Google so it can be found, but especially because content becomes monetized in doing so-- to the detriment of us all."

I don't really see the benefit of jumping from Google just to submit your privacy to the tender mercies of Facebook, Amazon, et. al, other than to say you did it.

And punting on GPS with a simple "Oh, I prefer paper maps" is a trifle disingenuous.

It's hard for me to take "Google divorce" seriously from someone who still uses Facebook.

It sounds like it was a "google divorce" and not necessarily a "facebook divorce." Are you advocating for a more broad "social networking divorce"?

I'm thinking that leaving Google due to privacy concerns, while keeping Facebook seems... odd.

I suspect the author may not have read the Facebook terms of service

Don't really see many items in the "Observations and Lessons Learned" categories, as he titles them, it seems mostly focused on how quitting Google makes him feel..

My additional recommendations:

Gmail -> business hushmail

Google Maps -> Bing Maps

GPS -> Use an actual GPS device or one of the iOS/Android maps that download to your phone.

GChat -> This one is tricky due to being subject to network effects. Without getting into hyper nerdy jabber or private IRC nonsense, I'd say just use OTR and be done with it if the point is privacy.

Google+ -> meet people for lunch

Docs -> Zoho/Microsoft Office/Open Office.org/LibreOffice

Google Drive -> Dropbox, add encryption if you want. There are libre alternatives if you want to set up your own fileserver with automagic sync. I'm trying not to get too far out into left-field on this list.

From the perspective of privacy, Microsoft/Bing anything isn't a meaningful alternative to Google. They have almost the same privacy policy and were far less transparent about adopting it.

See: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-privacy-change-google-att...

I'd replace gmail and gchat with fastmail.fm (owned by Opera, although if Facebook ever buys Opera...). You can run XMPP through fastmail's servers, which lets you IM all of your gchat friends (for now at least). As has been pointed out elsewhere, GChat's OTR is not the OTR protocol, so I wouldn't count on it giving you any extra privacy.

And it should go without saying that you get your own domain name for the accounts so that you can switch providers easily.

Is there any indication that FB plans to buy Opera in the (near) future?

There were rumors last year that never materialized, I assume that's what the parent is referring to.

It's been rumored repeatedly, but I'm not aware of anything firm.

And just in that webpage Ghostery blocked 16 scripts...

Thinking about how reliant I am on Google's services and how difficult it would be to find comparable alternatives makes me very nervous. Gmail, maps, drive, translate, search, youtube are all daily activities for me.

Sure I could replace drive with Dropbox but it is twice as expensive. I could replace GMail with Outlook or Yahoo but so many of my colleagues, contacts and friends get in touch with me through google talk. Plus none really compare to GMail in terms of ease of use (although I've really started to dislike the new compose feature).

The point is the individual pieces are probably replaceable, but no one even comes close to having such a cohesive, integrated set of products. At this point the best I can do is make sure I have an offline copy of as much as possible and hope for the best.

Personally, I just don't like to use Google because I think they are gaining way too much power to circumvent fair competition in the market, and even too much power over the lives of individuals. When I see google hardware devices running google operating systems with google web browsers and an increasing majority of people using them to almost exclusively access google web services and run google software... I'm sorry, but it's just bad news.

No matter how ahead-of-the-curve google innovation can be, I just don't think it's worth it to sell our souls to one company for the sake of convenience.

I've been pleasantly surprised with Fastmail.fm's new webmail interface, and am currently in the process of switching away from Google. The one thing I can't seem to find is a good replacement for Google Contacts or Google Calendar. I'm currently set up with an account at fruux.com, which does hosted carddav + caldav, but finding good clients for Linux has been more challenging than I expected.

  | finding good clients for Linux has been
  | more challenging than I expected

What are you looking for a potential client to do? Like a Linux version of Apple's iCal.app / AddressBook.app (i.e. standalone, more or less single-purpose apps)?

More or less. It looks like my only options are Evolution or Thunderbird with a pair of extensions (Lightning + SOGo Connector).

Given his reference to downloading apps from the Play store and Amazon store... it sure sounds like he's still using an Android device.

So what?

Play is a Google service. It kind of smacks of something beginning with "h" and ending with "ypocrisy" when you still use a Google service after going through the requisite self-flagellation to go out of your way to not use them, and then write a tone-deaf article on how awesome it is to do so.

It doesn't make much sense that someone would go through all this effort to ditch a company and still use one of their flagship products. That would be like me swearing off Apple and still carrying an iPhone.

Android and Play aren't synonymous. You can use Android without any trace of Google on your system; and, since Android is open source, it can be verified none of your information is being leaked.

Android is a Google product.

I don't understand why everyone is so big on switching away from Google these days. Some of my coworkers have been doing this as well.

Instead of giving away your personal information to one place, why not give it away to 10 or 20 places?

I think it makes sense to use the best tool for the job. At least when it comes to email, maps, and search I would argue that Gmail, Google Maps, and Google are the best services by a long shot.

Not to knock Duck Duck Go, but it would drive me crazy to have to do multiple searches or go through more results just to find something I could find on Google in the first half of the first page of results.

Sure I would get used to it eventually, but it's not worth losing my own time/productivity over.

I thought he switched to self hosted, open source alternatives. What a silly article.

There is more kinds of crazy than RMS. Also mail server seems self hosted.

RMS may seem crazy but there's a method to the madness. No one accuses him of hypocrisy or internal inconsistency. The author, on the other hand, is hilariously inconsistent (esp given his comfort with Facebook and the "settlement" copout)

Honestly, if they are going to get your information, who cares. Out of millions and billions of the information they get, why would they be interested about specifically yours. That's a big problem I have when people bring up privacy issues. There are certain lines, but Google's not crossing them. Sifting through your email to give you relevant advertising is harmless - in fact, some of it is how they get information for a very powerful Google Now.

For moving away from Gmail, I'd be interested in solutions that help you data-mine ahead of time how many mailing lists/services/etc you have linked to your address.

It might be easy to just "switch" one day away from Gmail, but it could easily be weeks and months of manually unsubscribing/notifying/etc providers of the new address to use.

Vacation autoresponder and automatic forwarding are godsends for that. Gmail also has the sense to not autorespond to mailing lists.

That is why you should spend $15/yr for a domain name for yourself or your family.

So the other services handle your data better ? Or is the just your resolution?

Ironically he is able to compare products/services......

I'm more curious what the author uses for his self-hosted email. None of the IMAP servers I've seen so far are particularly stellar.

I use Dovecot. I can't tell you much about it though because all I've ever had to do was point it my own SSL cert and turn off not non-encrypted connections. I use it with BlackBerry, Android, iOS and Thunderbird.

Third comment, but it bears repeating. Dovecot.

I use it with Postfix, using Dovecot's virtual domain support to host various domains/mailboxes. Dovecot with sieve sorts mail server side. It's fast and works incredibly well.

I like sieve. A lot.

Have you tried Dovecot?

Interesting how he did not list any Bing services as possible substitutes even for things like images, email and translation.

I am not sure, but I think babelfish uses bing translation.

Email, Google search, I understand but Youtube, seriously? what can be so bad about it? Google knowing that you're one of the 5 million ppl that viewed psy video clip? Suggestions to what to watch next based on whay you've seen recently?, yes that can be so annoying, I like to browse the entire video library watching 500 videos I don't want to watch to find the right one. IMHO That is just being too paranoid ...

I love Google. Its services are quite influential in my life and improve it in many ways.

What this person is trying to get away from requires not using the internet in any way.

Agree, choose another profession dude.

That post is devoid of insight and full of inaccuracies such that it could easily be mistaken for shameless attention seeking or just astroturf.

I got sick of seeing everything Google all the time, so for a change of scenery I went everything Microsoft. I even switched from Dropbox to SkyDrive because of it's tight integration with the new Microsoft Office web suite, OneNote and outlook.com.

Admittedly, I'm only changing one taskmaster for another, but overall the change has been good, like an upgrade.

Maybe he can stop using computers and go back to stone age.

Maybe you don't agree with his motivations, but explain to me how using DuckDuckGo (a startup with a fresh approach to search that only hired its first employee in 2011) as opposed to Google (which has been around since the previous millennium) is analogous to giving up one's computer and going back to the stone age?

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