> “Your smart home pings Google at the same time every hour in order to determine whether or not it’s connected to the internet,” Dhruv tells me. “Which is funny to me because these devices’ engineers decided to determine connectivity to the entire internet based on the uptime of a single company. It’s a good metaphor for how far the internet has strayed from its original promise to decentralize control.”
The alternative is effectively DDoSing random websites from 100 million devices, which is definitively an uncool move.
Not really. It can ping whatever resource it needs "the internet" for in the first place. After all, if that's down, then no amount of "internet" connectivity will help.
I put "internet" in quotes because it's not really a well-formed concept. How much of the global network needs to be accessible to count as "internet access"? Your home LAN? Your country? A specific server in Larry Page's basement?
That is the only alternative in your mind? It seems odd that required functionality of your home automation solution would not be built and maintained by you, the company creating it.
I am the only person on Earth, I think, that has had 0 problems with Apple Maps (at least, in the past year). I have never aimed for Cleveland and ended up in the Atlantic; and I've never been late or gotten lost. I think I've disagreed with its shortcuts once or twice.
Not denying your bad Apple Maps experience - just, I have no idea why mine is so trouble-free because so many have bad ones.
Occasionally I'll rent a car that only has Apple's Car Play and have to use my work iPhone to navigate (gawd forbid Apple would let us use Google Maps on Car Play;).
My experience has been universally poor:
- it provides no instructions for major actual intersections. It thinks you're staying on same main road even when there's a confusing Y in front of the driver. I have constant moments of panic when I see the intersection coming and no help from the maps.
- It provides confusing instructions on straight roads ("Turn right in 100 meters" when there's a stretch of straight road)
- It'll reference names for a road that are nowhere near what any of the signs indicate
- "Keep in right three lanes to stay on the road" - when the rightmost lane is actually a turning lane
- Something that is admittedly tricky, it struggles to provide useful instructions on more than four-way roads (e.g. if it's a 5-way or 6-way, "Turn right" has multiple interpretations). It doesn't use, at least not in my cases "bear right" or "slight right" or similar vs "turn right" or "acute right" or "sharp right" - and again, it gets the road names wrong.
- When Searching:
* it'll show me Bedford England 5000km away, but not Bedford NS 12km away
* It has some weird internal naming so searching for actual address will again not lead me anywhere near to what I want
Basically it's been a constant source of frustration beyond what I believe could reasonably be attributed to my inexperience with its UI :-/
EDIT/UPDATE: Thx for feedback; my work phone is on iOS 11, good to know that (*recently, after 4 years without it) CarPlay now supports other maps; note that I don't think it in any way makes Apple Maps experience itself any better 0:-)
Perhaps there's a setting I've missed, but for me Apple Maps seems to "lock" onto a particular route, and if I miss a direction it'll keep trying to get me back onto that route no matter how convoluted it would be, rather than updating to the new 'best route' like Google Maps usually manages.
Other than that, which I recognize as partially user error, Apple Maps works at least as well as Google. If anything I like their routing better... so long as there's no unexpected issues.
Same for me and I've used Apple Maps all over the US. Although there have been instances of Google Maps finding something Apple Maps couldn't, I've never actually gotten wrong directions.
I used to have a lot of problems with Apple Maps, but they've gotten a lot better over the years.
That said - there is a lot of feature parity that Apple Maps does not meet Google Maps on (i.e. - searching for something along your route is near impossible on Apple Maps, whereas that's a natural seamless integration on Google Maps).
Additionally, and this might be just because I'm more used to Google Maps, but the UI is way easier to follow in Google Maps - it feels more natural and in-sync with my actual position as a driver. If I have to turn off an intersection, I sometimes feel like I'm guessing if it's the right exit with Apple Maps, but never have such confusion on Google's.
Lastly - and this is also certainly anecdotal, but almost always Google Maps estimates are far more accurate for me than Apple Maps. Apple Maps has several times taken me a different route than Google Maps to my work, only for it to take another 5-10 minutes than normal. I've tried it several times and it just doesn't match up.
Apple Maps sometimes feels closer to a burden to bear since I've chosen Apple for so much - I wish it worked as well dearly, since Apple tries to make you use it so often, but because of the experience I'm much more willing to copy an address and paste it myself into Google Maps than get that sweet integrated sensation I crave.
I also find Apple Maps perfectly adequate for navigation around urban areas and some less urban areas as well, in USA and Europe. I found google maps better (but still not that great) in some more remote parts of Russia.
The two companies have different approaches to businesses, landmarks. I find Apple much better for places I"m familiar with -- generally has the info I am looking for without as much noise. But when I'm a tourist in someplace unfamiliar I find google clearer so far.
When we bought our newly built home in bay area 5 years ago, it took Apple maps 3 years to find it correctly. So many people went to wrong address as they did not follow my advise to use google maps. Apple maps auto-corrected the address to another place ~10 miles away.
I've never had any issues with it locally, and in fact I like it better than Google Maps in a lot of subtle little UX ways BUT I live less than 10 miles from Cupertino so it'd be crazy if they weren't really accurate here. I was in China a few weeks ago, where Google Maps is blocked, and was very impressed with the quality of the maps even in quite remote areas. Having access to reliable English/Pinyin maps in China is a new experience for me. On the other hand, in my travels to Mexico and even some rural parts of the US, I have seen a lack of detail in their maps compared to Google's.
The Uber/Lyft app dependency on Google is surprising but probably shouldn't be. I wonder/hope it's different on iOS?
Despite the tirade of anti-facebook/google/amazon blogs and posts in the last 5 years, I'm still not convinced that "being tracked" in my day-to-day life is a negative thing. I still don't perceive that my privacy is lost when I use those services. That information is shared with companies who use the data more-or-less responsibly with respect to my life.
Personally I prefer having a majority of my internet experience centralized in one place. Calendar, Email, files, maps, news, search, entertainment, etc. This saves a lot of time and effort in my life. Is it worth it?
> There’s no way I can delete my Gmail accounts completely as I did with Facebook. First off, it would be a huge security mistake; freeing up my email address for someone else to claim is just asking to be hacked.
Does Google really free up your email address for re-allocation when you delete your account? I do recall that was in issue at one point with Yahoo Mail. No email provider should allow the reassignment of previously used email addresses for precisely this reason.
Google doesn't recycle Gmail addresses. For anyone moving to paid email providers thinking they'd be a lot better, there are some paid providers who are very quick to recycle addresses on their domains: Fastmail, Posteo and Mailbox.org recycle email addresses on their domains within a few months, thus increasing the vulnerability of their current customers (where you delete one of the aliases on your account) and past customers. There may be many others too, but these are the ones I know of.
Great experiment. It really shows how badly we are dependent on Google. Everything relies on it, seems like it would be best if it was regulated as a public utility, enjoying monopoly but also having to serve the public good also when it doesn't necessarily align with its commercial interest (like in EU energy companies have to give you a link to the grid).
It also shows that it doesn't have real competitors, being so broad in scope and having all that data before others did.
I've pretty much run in that mode for years. No big problems. With Ghostery and Privacy Badger turned up to high, and third party cookies blocked, Google doesn't get much through. My phone, a ruggedized Android model from Caterpillar Tractor, has no Google apps other than the Google Play Services middleware. I've never had Facebook on a phone.
Mail is on Thunderbird and an IMAP server at an ISP. My email address is on my own domain. If I want to make something available to others, I put it on Github, or an "outgoing" directory on my web site. Documents are edited with LibreOffice. Browsing is with Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on the phone.
A few sites don't load properly, but they're marginal ones for which there are better alternatives. More often, the site loads but the ads don't, which is nice. I don't see many ads.
It's just easier this way. The junk level is way down.
I think we as a community need to embrace a more holistic approach to the problem of privacy.
It's great that some of us can protect privacy by going crazy on each channel that leaks our personal data. But the remaining >7B people on the planet will still leak a lot of personal details, undermining their authority over their choices. If the data creep continues we'll one day find ourselves in a dystopia, and we'll be the people to blame. Much like the 2008 crisis is the fault of bankers because it was easiest for them to figure out that the human project is headed towards suffering.
Worth noting that by blocking all Google IPs, the author is not only cutting out Google services, but also any other application that relies on Google services. For example, there's a bit in there about not being able to use Dropbox because it uses Captcha.
google recaptcha is a scourge. 90% of the time i'm met with it, i just close the tab and don't use the service. the other 10% is usually something i already use so i can't easily do that. but i hate it so much that i will switch eventually (e.g., https://spideroak.com/ or setting up an instance of https://nextcloud.com/ instead of dropbox).
For maps, I'd add Here (https://wego.here.com/) to the Apple Maps and Mapquest options she chose. It's the mapping solution that Microsoft got from Nokia, and is used by a lot of in-car navigation systems IIRC.
It suffers by comparison to Google Maps mostly in the lack of integration with the full database of businesses/reviews/etc. though I think it probably has most of the business listings. I suspect its traffic info is weaker as well, though I haven't really checked.
I get the world's Google dependency. I really do. I tried most of their mainstream services myself and they were indeed as good as I'd been told. But they're online only. And their Office apps tank next to Microsoft Office. And nothing I've seen matches the utility of Outlook. Besides, the prospect of transferring all my meticulously collected birthdays from Outlook to Gmail didn't float my boat at all. In the 00's I eventually switched from IE to Firefox, and have never tried Chrome.
One employer used Gmail, and I happily used it whilst employed there, but that didn't do nearly enough to change my mind.
And so I never did buy into Google like the linked article describes. To this day I cannot imagine a scenario in which I'd trust my world to a single vendor, in a single location.
It's no surprise that the non-technical great unwashed don't think this way, but it surprises me that technically literate and able people do not care for reducing or eliminating the risk posed by depending on a single vendor for... everything.
I am guessing that if she has already dropped Microsoft that is why she can't use Bing maps. Not as ubiquitous as Google Maps, or as featured as even Apple maps, but still ahead of Mapquest :-)
> I create new email addresses on Protonmail and Riseup.net (for work and personal email, respectively) [..]
I wouldn't do that. Riseup is providing email on a very tight budget. They are activists and every free account they give out is using some precious resources. Unless you really need it for specific purposes I believe it's better to go to fastmail or protonmail for "general purposes" email needs.
A lot of commenters in here are saying "oh yeah, I've done something similar, not that hard/different." What they're glossing over is how the author also blocked all Google IPs, meaning that Google Cloud Platform is no longer available, along with assorted services. This means authentication like captchas, anything that uses maps besides Google's own offering (Lyft, Uber, Yelp, etc), and photos being hosted on their version of AWS S3 is included.
There is a ton of web and data infrastructure being hosted/ran by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that we often don't think about. The only big service provider I can think of besides those three is Digital Ocean, and it's not a 1:1 comparison, since they're more like infrastructure.
*edit: Basically, if you find Amazon so abhorrent that you want to cut them out of your life, you can't unless you eschew huge swathes of the internet. Which might work for you. But think about that: they own the digital land under our feet.
I've taken similar steps, though have not gone so far as to set up a vpn block to all google ips. I do have as much fingerprinting and privacy protection as possible enabled in Firefox though. I find the worst experience is captcha, it will no longer give me free passes and I regularly have to sit there for several minutes providing training data that they reject. It's to the point where I just avoid sites that require it. Newegg is a particularly egregious offender as they seem to require a very high degree of certainty.
Is trading Google cloud products for Apple cloud products really such a big change? I could see the truly privacy paranoid running away from all cloud services and running their own everything, but just switching cloud providers doesn't seem like a meaningful difference to me. OK, so now Apple has all of your data instead of Google. Either way it's in the hands of a big corporation, and by extension, the government.
Apple's business model relies first and foremost on selling hardware, not knowing as much as possible about you. Recently they realized they can turn this into a selling point, so they try to do more locally and NOT store your data server-side. Technically this is a lot more challenging but I appreciate the privacy aspect.
Here's a paper they put out about how they handle learning from their users in aggregate without knowing anything about specific users—they call it differential privacy:
Apple has a phone number you can call and talk to someone who can actually fix your problems. Google does not.
Wife's appleid got broken into last year and some stuff was purchased with funds in the account. One call, and we got our money back and the account all reset. After being the administrator of a google business account for a few years, I was astonished. I'm not really ok with how much information apple OR google has on their users, but I am absolutely sure that apple is doing a better job and is more trustworthy.
Google's core business is advertising, while Apple's core business is hardware. One has a much greater incentive to collect, store, and exploit users' data.
So much of this is overblown... and I say this as someone who goes out of their way to avoid using Amazon/Google/etc for privacy reasons.
The biggest problem with debating privacy and security these days is the sheer paranoia running rampant from people who don't understand the workings behind the scenes, coupled with the people behind the scenes assuming defensive tones from the get-go whenever stuff is brought up.
This non-tech person's attempt looks to me is futile, just switching from Google to Apple or other companies doesn't mean you won't be tracked. To me the best solution will be self-hosting cloud services for email, calendar, and using TomTom or Garmin GPS.
[+] [-] bpicolo|7 years ago|reply
The alternative is effectively DDoSing random websites from 100 million devices, which is definitively an uncool move.
[+] [-] dTal|7 years ago|reply
I put "internet" in quotes because it's not really a well-formed concept. How much of the global network needs to be accessible to count as "internet access"? Your home LAN? Your country? A specific server in Larry Page's basement?
[+] [-] quest88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootlooped|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
FWIW, I use whitehouse.gov. I figure it's my tax dollars at work.
[+] [-] tivert|7 years ago|reply
The alternative is that the devices:
* ping an IP controlled by their manufacturer, and/or
* try to ping one of a catalog of multiple large sites (e.g. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) instead of relying just on Google, and/or
* allow the user to override the IP they use.
[+] [-] sofaofthedamned|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3xblah|7 years ago|reply
For me, these are the most important servers for the www. More important than Google's.
Never thought to use a "random website". Is that your idea?
[+] [-] cco|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdinsn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jm_l|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neurobashing|7 years ago|reply
Not denying your bad Apple Maps experience - just, I have no idea why mine is so trouble-free because so many have bad ones.
(For calibration, I live in NoVA)
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|7 years ago|reply
Occasionally I'll rent a car that only has Apple's Car Play and have to use my work iPhone to navigate (gawd forbid Apple would let us use Google Maps on Car Play;).
My experience has been universally poor:
- it provides no instructions for major actual intersections. It thinks you're staying on same main road even when there's a confusing Y in front of the driver. I have constant moments of panic when I see the intersection coming and no help from the maps.
- It provides confusing instructions on straight roads ("Turn right in 100 meters" when there's a stretch of straight road)
- It'll reference names for a road that are nowhere near what any of the signs indicate
- "Keep in right three lanes to stay on the road" - when the rightmost lane is actually a turning lane
- Something that is admittedly tricky, it struggles to provide useful instructions on more than four-way roads (e.g. if it's a 5-way or 6-way, "Turn right" has multiple interpretations). It doesn't use, at least not in my cases "bear right" or "slight right" or similar vs "turn right" or "acute right" or "sharp right" - and again, it gets the road names wrong.
- When Searching:
* it'll show me Bedford England 5000km away, but not Bedford NS 12km away
* It has some weird internal naming so searching for actual address will again not lead me anywhere near to what I want
Basically it's been a constant source of frustration beyond what I believe could reasonably be attributed to my inexperience with its UI :-/
EDIT/UPDATE: Thx for feedback; my work phone is on iOS 11, good to know that (*recently, after 4 years without it) CarPlay now supports other maps; note that I don't think it in any way makes Apple Maps experience itself any better 0:-)
[+] [-] professorgerm|7 years ago|reply
Perhaps there's a setting I've missed, but for me Apple Maps seems to "lock" onto a particular route, and if I miss a direction it'll keep trying to get me back onto that route no matter how convoluted it would be, rather than updating to the new 'best route' like Google Maps usually manages.
Other than that, which I recognize as partially user error, Apple Maps works at least as well as Google. If anything I like their routing better... so long as there's no unexpected issues.
[+] [-] mereel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ar_lan|7 years ago|reply
That said - there is a lot of feature parity that Apple Maps does not meet Google Maps on (i.e. - searching for something along your route is near impossible on Apple Maps, whereas that's a natural seamless integration on Google Maps).
Additionally, and this might be just because I'm more used to Google Maps, but the UI is way easier to follow in Google Maps - it feels more natural and in-sync with my actual position as a driver. If I have to turn off an intersection, I sometimes feel like I'm guessing if it's the right exit with Apple Maps, but never have such confusion on Google's.
Lastly - and this is also certainly anecdotal, but almost always Google Maps estimates are far more accurate for me than Apple Maps. Apple Maps has several times taken me a different route than Google Maps to my work, only for it to take another 5-10 minutes than normal. I've tried it several times and it just doesn't match up.
Apple Maps sometimes feels closer to a burden to bear since I've chosen Apple for so much - I wish it worked as well dearly, since Apple tries to make you use it so often, but because of the experience I'm much more willing to copy an address and paste it myself into Google Maps than get that sweet integrated sensation I crave.
[+] [-] gumby|7 years ago|reply
The two companies have different approaches to businesses, landmarks. I find Apple much better for places I"m familiar with -- generally has the info I am looking for without as much noise. But when I'm a tourist in someplace unfamiliar I find google clearer so far.
[+] [-] irrational|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tradertef|7 years ago|reply
Other than that, I did not have much issues.
[+] [-] svachalek|7 years ago|reply
The Uber/Lyft app dependency on Google is surprising but probably shouldn't be. I wonder/hope it's different on iOS?
[+] [-] kawfey|7 years ago|reply
Personally I prefer having a majority of my internet experience centralized in one place. Calendar, Email, files, maps, news, search, entertainment, etc. This saves a lot of time and effort in my life. Is it worth it?
[+] [-] tivert|7 years ago|reply
Does Google really free up your email address for re-allocation when you delete your account? I do recall that was in issue at one point with Yahoo Mail. No email provider should allow the reassignment of previously used email addresses for precisely this reason.
[+] [-] kyrra|7 years ago|reply
According to [0]: "Your Gmail address can’t be used by anyone else in the future."
[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/61177?hl=en&topic=238...
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|7 years ago|reply
https://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52805929240/yournameyahoocom-c...
Seems really crazy considering how email is often the verification for password recovery.
[+] [-] newscracker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polskibus|7 years ago|reply
It also shows that it doesn't have real competitors, being so broad in scope and having all that data before others did.
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
Mail is on Thunderbird and an IMAP server at an ISP. My email address is on my own domain. If I want to make something available to others, I put it on Github, or an "outgoing" directory on my web site. Documents are edited with LibreOffice. Browsing is with Firefox on the desktop and Fennec on the phone. A few sites don't load properly, but they're marginal ones for which there are better alternatives. More often, the site loads but the ads don't, which is nice. I don't see many ads.
It's just easier this way. The junk level is way down.
[+] [-] YjSe2GMQ|7 years ago|reply
It's great that some of us can protect privacy by going crazy on each channel that leaks our personal data. But the remaining >7B people on the planet will still leak a lot of personal details, undermining their authority over their choices. If the data creep continues we'll one day find ourselves in a dystopia, and we'll be the people to blame. Much like the 2008 crisis is the fault of bankers because it was easiest for them to figure out that the human project is headed towards suffering.
[+] [-] ariwilson|7 years ago|reply
https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five
[+] [-] mrweasel|7 years ago|reply
> I have to admit that the enjoyment of a holiday dedicated to dressing up is somewhat degraded when not using Facebook’s apps.
[+] [-] jm_l|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jplayer01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auslander|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fencepost|7 years ago|reply
It suffers by comparison to Google Maps mostly in the lack of integration with the full database of businesses/reviews/etc. though I think it probably has most of the business listings. I suspect its traffic info is weaker as well, though I haven't really checked.
[+] [-] Spearchucker|7 years ago|reply
One employer used Gmail, and I happily used it whilst employed there, but that didn't do nearly enough to change my mind.
And so I never did buy into Google like the linked article describes. To this day I cannot imagine a scenario in which I'd trust my world to a single vendor, in a single location.
It's no surprise that the non-technical great unwashed don't think this way, but it surprises me that technically literate and able people do not care for reducing or eliminating the risk posed by depending on a single vendor for... everything.
Especially given what we know about Google.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't do that. Riseup is providing email on a very tight budget. They are activists and every free account they give out is using some precious resources. Unless you really need it for specific purposes I believe it's better to go to fastmail or protonmail for "general purposes" email needs.
[+] [-] wishinghand|7 years ago|reply
There is a ton of web and data infrastructure being hosted/ran by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that we often don't think about. The only big service provider I can think of besides those three is Digital Ocean, and it's not a 1:1 comparison, since they're more like infrastructure.
*edit: Basically, if you find Amazon so abhorrent that you want to cut them out of your life, you can't unless you eschew huge swathes of the internet. Which might work for you. But think about that: they own the digital land under our feet.
[+] [-] pbalau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slippery_John|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggpsv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athenot|7 years ago|reply
Here's a paper they put out about how they handle learning from their users in aggregate without knowing anything about specific users—they call it differential privacy:
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...
[+] [-] 51lver|7 years ago|reply
Wife's appleid got broken into last year and some stuff was purchased with funds in the account. One call, and we got our money back and the account all reset. After being the administrator of a google business account for a few years, I was astonished. I'm not really ok with how much information apple OR google has on their users, but I am absolutely sure that apple is doing a better job and is more trustworthy.
[+] [-] bootlooped|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Klonoar|7 years ago|reply
The biggest problem with debating privacy and security these days is the sheer paranoia running rampant from people who don't understand the workings behind the scenes, coupled with the people behind the scenes assuming defensive tones from the get-go whenever stuff is brought up.
[+] [-] xamlhacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pleasecalllater|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] budadre75|7 years ago|reply