[wordsunite]

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better.

I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.

[MontyCarloHall]

>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products.

I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.

"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.

[0] https://wordsunite.us/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8

[2] https://wordsunite.us/terms

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698

[oceansky]

Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account.

Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment

[jbstack]

It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.

[nxpnsv]

But you can still reduce your exposure. Giving in to hopelessness seems suboptimal.

[wordsunite]

The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.

What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.

Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.

[iririririr]

Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.

I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.

[ironsmoke]

Perfect is the enemy of good.

[miyuru]

his app has also Google, Apple logins and for first time I have seen, login with meta button.

https://app.wordsunite.us/

[Gormo]

I don't think using AWS has quite the same privacy implications to using Amazon's own SaaS services.

[m3kw9]

It’s hard that’s why he is still using it

[embedding-shape]

> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products

It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.

[prmoustache]

It really depends where the restaurant is located.

[okanat]

That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.

[derbOac]

I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing.

Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?

My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.

I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.

A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.

I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.

[dopidopHN2]

You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight

[WarmWash]

Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free".

Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register.

People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.

[NotMichaelBay]

I see what you're saying but I don't think that's the answer for everything, because people also pay for conveniences, like a Ring subscription so that Amazon stores footage in their cloud for you.

The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.

Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.

[bloak]

Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.

[cgriswald]

People pay for things and are still spied on.

[danaris]

And the problem with that is, all the money has been siphoned off by the people at the top.

That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).

[joquarky]

It's easy to say we should all start paying for things.

Most people don't have much of a disposable income.

[drnick1]

DuckDuckGo is free to use, and is proof that you can have privacy respecting search. They make their money like Google used to by selling rankings, not by having users log in so that they can be followed across all their devices.

[simpaticoder]

>People need to start paying for things

...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.

<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>

[intended]

We could

- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.

- enforce laws on the books

- Break up firms

Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.

Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.

I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.

[salawat]

Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.

[fwipsy]

The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.

[adamsb6]

You can self host AI but speed and quality aren’t going to be as good as what companies can offer.

And the upfront cost will be quite high.

[harimau777]

I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage.

So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."

I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.

[drnick1]

> So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."

You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.

[kace91]

Where are you that Facebook (the network, not meta as a company) is still minimally relevant ? I haven’t logged in in about a decade.

[gtowey]

People before Facebook found themselves in exactly the same situation as you and managed to survive.

People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.

People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.

Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.

[epolanski]

Nonsense, those aren't real relationships if you don't have numbers to each other and the relationships die with you deleting an account.

I've deleted all of my socials but LinkedIn in 2019 and I haven't missed anything at all.

[II2II]

In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription.

At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)

[Insanity]

Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.

Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.

[neoCrimeLabs]

Agreed.

That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.

I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.

Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."

My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.

For others', that might be an impossible task.

[barnacs]

> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products

That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?

This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.

It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?

[mistrial9]

"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.

[notepad0x90]

None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?

[pjmlp]

Alone from that list, it means.

No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.

Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.

[m3kw9]

Surveillance is not black or white. In this world you’d have to be a cave man to not get surveyed, you just have to pick your battles. Not using any other the big 5-10’s product or s like saying don’t buy from Walmart or something. It’s stupid

[n8cpdx]

It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples:

- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.

- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.

- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?

- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.

- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.

[ulfw]

No no you see... when Google or Amazon or Meta et al are doing it it's a-okay. But let's ban Huawei or DJI on 'National Security' grounds because they MIGHT be doing this too!

[AtlasBarfed]

Other people are using them.

You are surrounded by people using them.

Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode.

And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.

[ted_bunny]

As if these tech giants are an aberration? Any company filling their niche will be under the same pressures.

[tjpnz]

Meta was easy - nothing of value is lost. Google and Amazon are a bit harder.

[anigbrowl]

Do you have any evidence that this actually works as a strategy?

[chistev]

They are everywhere