> "Like most people, I don't like to be tracked. I also am the founder of the search engine that doesn't track you, DuckDuckGo."
It pains me to hear intelligent people talk about being "tracked" as something "bad" a priori. While there are certainly plenty of examples of abuse of knowledge, I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building." Let me explain...
Google is a service provider that I frequent, just like my coffee roaster or my stock broker or whatever. Over time, service providers develop a relationship with their customers based on knowledge of that customer. This knowledge helps inform how they provide and improve their service. My coffee roaster knows what kinds of coffee I like and makes appropriate recommendations when new beans arrive. My stock broker knows what kinds of risks I like to take and gives appropriate investment direction.
Ok, so I don't really have a stock broker but... My point is: I appreciate that google is aware enough to know that when I search for "hash salt" I'm not talking about potatoes. DDG shows me recipes and first.
The problem (as with most things that are hot-button issues) is that the most talked about thing - "tracking" - is a red herring. The REAL issue is accountability. True information lockdown rarely benefits anyone, but openness without accountability is useless and downright dangerous.
Suggesting people flee one provider's services and head to other providers who are not concretely more accountable (just because they "say so" doesn't make it true) is simply being petty. We should instead be spending out breath advocating for greater accountability in the system as a whole.
His point is more about not putting all your eggs in one basket; you certainly don't tell your barista about an upcoming physician's appointment, or that you are in the market for a house. Your barista is also disconnected from parties who may leverage the information you provide him/her. Similarly, you don't tell your broker that you prefer Ethiopian coffee. Google offers so many services that it has a much broader insight into who you are. To the privacy-conscious, that's an unacceptable fact. Nothing to be pained about.
> I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building."
That is just another term (and a significantly creepier one) for the same thing, for those people who don't want that kind of relationship. A good rule of thumb would be to assume that people who "don't want to be tracked" have already considered the fact that tracking may help the company in question improve its service to them -- after all, this is frequently given as the justification for tracking.
From this viewpoint ("I don't want that kind of relationship, and am prepared to live with the associated service degradation"), it is logical to switch to services for which your envisaged greater accountability isn't necessary.
Incidentally, I have issues with DDG simply because it will return Android programming results from 2011 in preference to those from 2014, despite the entire state of play having changed in those three years, because it was a really good result in 2011 -- or because it simply doesn't seem to index as much of the Web. These are just anecdotes, but in my personal experience the "relationship" I have with Google search isn't a very large part of why it's good.
"It pains me to hear intelligent people talk about being "tracked" as something "bad" a priori."
Tracking is bad when you know little to nothing about what is being is tracked about you and how that information is used. While you might get targeted or personalised results as a result of tracking, that is likely just a small outcome of the data collected about you. Who knows what else is being analysed or number-crunched about your online behaviour? If you read Google's privacy policy, the most notable aspect is how little it tells you. Nothing about how your data is aggregated, who sees your data, how long that data is kept for, whether it's anonymised. Is the data collected to "protect Google and our users" (their words) used solely for that purpose? (For example, providing your date-of-birth for age verification and your mobile number for two-factor authentication.) Or is this information also used for tracking and profile-building? These are all reasonable questions to ask any company that tracks you online or asks for your personal information. But Google aren't giving answers. And Google arguably tracks online behaviour more than anyone else.
Nice to hear thoughts on this subject i agree with.
Myself, i've long used Google and hadn't cared at all what information they collect about me. Rather, i openly give them information. Sure, if the world turns to hell and suddenly the government is at my door because Google "knew too much" then the naysayers can laugh at me all they like.. Then again, the world has turned to hell already, so is it really a time to laugh?
In the mean time, i want to give Google my info, because "Google Now" is a great example of a service attempting to predict my needs. Keeping up to date with my life, and giving me information i want, without having to even ask for it. I don't want dumb computers, i want intelligent meaningful interactions, tailored to my life. And i can't get that by being a black box.
Tracking is an issue in that your interests, preferences, and proclivities are being used to make others richer. Hey if that's ok with you then I'm cool with that. I'm not cool with me doing that. I run ad blockers. If you make a living from ads then offer me a paid-for alternative. I avoid everything Google. I use a Windows Phone without a Microsoft account. If an app wants access to my contacts it doesn't get installed. My blog is my own code because I own what I write so I want control. In the absolute sense. I'd rather pay than use a free service, because being a cynic I don't believe altruism in it's truest sense exists.
> My point is: I appreciate that google is aware enough to know that when I search for "hash salt" I'm not talking about potatoes. DDG shows me recipes and first.
That's the reason I always come back to google and search logged in. Almost all my searches are computer or more generally electronic related. On other search engines I get useless results.
> I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building."
I'm fine with relationship building. Google can give me better search results based on other activity they observe; I'm perfectly fine with that. They're simply trying to better their product for the user.
What I'm not fine with is the fact that Google is an advertising company. We're not the end-users, we're the product. Intuition says Google is selling the valuable information they collect to third-party advertisers. This means that our valuable information is being leaked to third parties I'm not sure I can trust.
At the core of it, I only want to give my information out to parties I trust. I don't care if it's valuable information or not, I just want to be in control. I don't want my info being sold to some advertising company -- after all, I'll only buy their product after I build a relationship with Google and they can provide the most relevant links.
Truthfully. I would have no problem with the amount of data google aggregated on me, if I could depend on them not using that data against me, or to manipulate me, or to sell it to someone who would do either of those two.
If someone came up to me and said "I'll give you 5 dollars if you give me the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and personal vulnerabilities of all your friends", agreeing to that would be considered a massive breach of trust and a horrible act. On the web it seems like standard procedure.
I will give you that tracking isn't innately bad, but it is an act of trust, and the question is: do you trust google?
> The REAL issue is accountability. True information lockdown rarely benefits anyone, but openness without accountability is useless and downright dangerous.
Google is accountable. The problem is that they are accountable to advertisers, currently to the tune of about $55 billion per year.
For consumers to hold Google accountable, they have to fight against their addiction to free web content and services, and start directly paying for what they consume. It's important to note that "Google is free!" is an outright lie, and in fact we are paying more for Google through advertising than if we just paid straight up[1].
> We should instead be spending our breath advocating for greater accountability in the system as a whole.
The best way to do that is to advocate against ad-supported websites and services, and to advocate (and invent if missing) honest ways to get necessary revenue[2].
[2] I avoid the term "monetization" which to me is a word invented to make it easier to be dishonest.
[EDIT] Sigh. As usual, either Google or advertising apologists are downvoting without supplying a reason. Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Too many people here have a salary dependent on advertising, or an identity dependent on Google fanboyism.
There is an additional problem (over and above privacy concerns) with putting all your eggs in one basket that is not mentioned - namely if you are cut off from the service for 1 reason or another. This can happen because you do something on 1 of the many services that goes against the TOS and you get cut off from all services. There are other reasons of course: The site could go down, the suite of services may be vulnerable to a tailored malware attack etc.
Pervasive surveillence is too high a price to pay for the convenience of being able to type "hash salt" instead of "hash salt computers".
"Relationships" are built by two people, not by one person being followed around the entire interney by a multibillion dollar international conglomerate.
> While there are certainly plenty of examples of abuse of knowledge, I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building."
Not to accuse you of anything, but I would imagine that this is what most stalkers think, as well.
Actually search DDG for "hash salt" and although it shows some recipe images at the top, the first 6 and the vast majority of all the actual search results are specifically about cryptography, the top result being Wikipedia's article on the topic of salt in cryptography.
> appreciate that google is aware enough to know that when I search for "hash salt" I'm not talking about potatoes. DDG shows me recipes and first.
Really? For that exact query, I get the Wikipedia page for "Salt (Cryptography)", "How to Hash Passwords", and "Salt the Hash - Security tutorial"... you get the idea[0].
AFAIK, the stuff you're seeing at the top is their 'zero click' information, which Google never provided (until after DDG added it and promoted it as a selling point). That's a little hit-or-miss, sure, but the actual search results of DDG are generally just as relevant.
I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for years now - I still resort to "!g" searches sometimes, but I have to do it far less than I used to.
We live in the information age and information now is the ultimate power. Many people don't believe it, the same way that before the Civil and Crimean Wars not everybody believed that industry is the ultimate power of the industrial age.
By letting Google collect enormous amounts of data about you, you are letting them have power over you. It can be used for pushing you to buy stuff against your rational will or for killing you, if say at any point you decide to not fully cooperate with a future totalitarian government.
The issue here is information monopoly. If one provider controls every bit of information about you than it eventually leads to a master/puppet scenario.
With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about - Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google.
You are very naive. Nature hates a power vacuum. Accountability, requires being able to enforce, if the other party is not accountable. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before you are being used in some, or many, ways. The asymmetry of power between Joe Doe, you, and a huge multi national, assures that you can't enforce, and so you can't keep the other party accountable.
"tracking is, a priori, something bad, even when it's open and part of a relationship in which you appreciate the other party remembering certain things about you"
Advocating for greater accountability across the board sounds great in principle, but what does that even mean? Are we to hold Google, accountable for monetizing the data they collect on us? That's the social contract you engage in with Google, when you use their services.
Looking at the underlying business model is more effective. I am confident that DDG is going to respect my privacy, because that's what their whole business is built on! Similarly, I would be shocked if Apple turned around and started selling my data to advertisers, because I am their customer and I am the one paying them.
OK, there's some value in diversifying instead of using one provider for everything but mostly he just swapped Apple, Fastmail, or Clicky in place of Google. They can still track him, read his email, know his calendar... The benefit here is marginal.
And how do those companies stack up against Google when it comes to security? It's one thing to protect the data against snooping by the provider, it's anoter to protect it from everyone else. Google is pretty solid, often on the cutting edge (PFS, certificate pinning).
I switched to fastmail and duckduckgo in lieu of google products a little over a year ago for some of the same reasons. I tried to switch to safari from chrome, and that experiment lasted about 3 months before I got annoyed by how safari handles multiple tabs.
But, as far as most of the criticisms posted here, they're really unfounded. If you want to be a purist about privacy, you really have to just quit using technology. It's not realistic. Yes, you can be an idealist and try to run your own email server, etc. but it's really about balancing tradeoffs. I also use Apple maps and iCloud and dropbox and Evernote and... many other services we should give just as much scrutiny to as Google.
I don't see my choices as being about riding a high-horse, it's about a diversified portfolio of services that helps me avoid total lock-in. The day that google heavily oversteps with the G+ product strategy or twitter completely goes to shit, I've got a series of alternative services that can pick up the slack.
My thing isn't that I don't trust any one particular Google product. It's that I don't feel safe putting all of my eggs into one basket. A year ago, Google was my phone, my search engine, my email, video hosting, my DNS, my IM service (GTalk when it was still a thing), and cloud storage system. That's a lot of personal stuff all tied together under one account. So I split things up. I hosted some stuff where I could (email and online storage) and used different services/products where I couldn't. But I also continue to use Google for my search engine.
I don't really see it as a question of if Google will screw up with people's data, it's a question of when.
This. Right now I'm also more comfortable with Apple having my info, because their business is built on providing me with a premium product & charging me for it. Google is built on monetizing my data and selling me better ads.
>>But, as far as most of the criticisms posted here, they're really unfounded. If you want to be a purist about privacy, you really have to just quit using technology. It's not realistic.
Exactly. It's not realistic because it's a strawman, and a disingenuous one at that.
No one really wants to be a "purist" about privacy. Indeed, the only way to live a 100% private life is to have a cabin on some uncharted island and never leave it.
Rational people, on the other hand, realize that there are certain privacy costs to living in modern society. They simply want to make informed decisions about which benefits to trade off those costs for.
What the author advises against is giving all your information to one company, i.e. Google. This holds especially true since said company's core business is serving you advertisements and generally controlling your Internet experience (using the "personal filter bubble" described in the article) using the information it has about you. Instead, he is suggesting that people spread their information across multiple service providers so that no single one of them can compile it to get a wholesome picture of who you are. The point is not to avoid giving your personal information (although the less you have to give, the better). The point is to avoid putting all of it in the hands of one company.
I recently migrated to Fastmail, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. Fastmail automatically imports your emails from Gmail, and it took me so little time that I kicked myself for not doing it before.
> Calendar: iCloud
For those of us who don't use both OS X and iOS, this isn't feasible. Fortunately, though, Fastmail also provides a calendar service. It synchronizes with Google Calendar in case you still need to use Google (e.g. for work), and it was also a seamless switch.
As for a client, I was very surprised by this, but I've actually found that the latest version of Mozilla Lightning[0] is the best calendar interface. Fastmail's is okay, but still in beta (it's less than a year old). Setting up Lightning to sync with Fastmail's calendar took just a minute, and I actually like the interface more than I liked Google Calendar's[1].
Thunderbird is an okay mail client (not a terrible interface, but not a great one), but even if you don't use Thunderbird for mail, I would recommend trying out Lightning for calendaring.
[1] It's okay for viewing events in the week view, but there are a lot of UI quirks and bugs that catch up with you after daily use - this one is the most pernicious, but there are a number that are simply annoying as well: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-google-calendar-... [2]
[2] Since I know people will ask - I consider this a UI issue because it's fairly easy to imagine a minor UI improvement that would indicate this unexpected result of Quick Add (and others) before clicking "Add" without sacrificing this functionality in case it is desired.
Personally, I have a VPS where I keep my own mail server, webmail, ownCloud instance (calendar, address book, file storage, etc), IRC bouncer... All courtesy of Sovereign (https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)
Another Fastmail endorsement--they really are fantastic. I confess to still using Gmail for some things but it's mostly just because I've been too lazy to switch over all of my accounts. Fastmail is truly a better service.
As for calendar, I've heard good things about https://fruux.com/ although I haven't tried that myself yet. (And apparently Fastmail does calendar too--again, haven't tried.)
> "Practically, switching away from as many Google services as possible will help alleviate the most obvious issues like most of your personal data being in the hands of one company and the related issue of ads following you around the Internet."
Ads that follow you has absolutely nothing to do with Google services. These are retargeting companies using their cookies to track you. They use ad exchanges, so even that is not principally Google.
I, too, am very unhappy with Google. They're obviously intentionally trying to get people to get used to giving up privacy. From the moronic system Android has, to the tricky dialogs Chrome puts up, they don't like the anti-tracking sentiment.
But... DuckDuckGo just doesn't compete on search results. I changed to it as my default search engine, but I ended up going to Google most of the time.
And switching away from Android... I tried to move to Windows 8 / Phone, but the ecosystem is a joke. Desktop apps don't work well on their small tablet form factor, and the Metro apps are laughably terrible. Microsoft can't even prevent total scams, like $9 fake Netflix and HBO. And they ignore reports about them.
Until recently, I also was very concerned with privacy, partly not wanting my personal data available easily to many large corporations, and also wanting to keep resources for client work very secure.
What changed is that I have retired (except for some mentoring and writing). Now, I would like the tech side of my life to be as simple as possible in order to free up my time for other activities. So for right now I am massively using Google services but I am considering, depending on how much I like the iPhone 6, just living in Apple's little walled garden. I trust both Apple and Google to generally do the right things.
I still advise friends and family to run Adblock software, and to be generally prudent privacy and security wise. But for me personally privacy issues are not as important as they once were.
> On top of the browser I use these add-ons to reduce tracking further; also, note that private browsing mode and the do not track setting will not stop you from being tracked.
Google's/Facebook's/Twitter's JS scripts are literally on every site. Fingerprinting allows them to increase their ROI since it builds more precise profiles on you. The advertising industry is happy and the government is happy. So forget about them not fingerprinting you.
It's sad that the only alternatives he can come up with for one set of cloud based services by one set of providers is another set of cloud based services by another set of providers.
[+] [-] astrocat|11 years ago|reply
It pains me to hear intelligent people talk about being "tracked" as something "bad" a priori. While there are certainly plenty of examples of abuse of knowledge, I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building." Let me explain...
Google is a service provider that I frequent, just like my coffee roaster or my stock broker or whatever. Over time, service providers develop a relationship with their customers based on knowledge of that customer. This knowledge helps inform how they provide and improve their service. My coffee roaster knows what kinds of coffee I like and makes appropriate recommendations when new beans arrive. My stock broker knows what kinds of risks I like to take and gives appropriate investment direction.
Ok, so I don't really have a stock broker but... My point is: I appreciate that google is aware enough to know that when I search for "hash salt" I'm not talking about potatoes. DDG shows me recipes and first.
The problem (as with most things that are hot-button issues) is that the most talked about thing - "tracking" - is a red herring. The REAL issue is accountability. True information lockdown rarely benefits anyone, but openness without accountability is useless and downright dangerous.
Suggesting people flee one provider's services and head to other providers who are not concretely more accountable (just because they "say so" doesn't make it true) is simply being petty. We should instead be spending out breath advocating for greater accountability in the system as a whole.
[+] [-] dskhatri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wzdd|11 years ago|reply
That is just another term (and a significantly creepier one) for the same thing, for those people who don't want that kind of relationship. A good rule of thumb would be to assume that people who "don't want to be tracked" have already considered the fact that tracking may help the company in question improve its service to them -- after all, this is frequently given as the justification for tracking.
From this viewpoint ("I don't want that kind of relationship, and am prepared to live with the associated service degradation"), it is logical to switch to services for which your envisaged greater accountability isn't necessary.
Incidentally, I have issues with DDG simply because it will return Android programming results from 2011 in preference to those from 2014, despite the entire state of play having changed in those three years, because it was a really good result in 2011 -- or because it simply doesn't seem to index as much of the Web. These are just anecdotes, but in my personal experience the "relationship" I have with Google search isn't a very large part of why it's good.
[+] [-] chestnut-tree|11 years ago|reply
Tracking is bad when you know little to nothing about what is being is tracked about you and how that information is used. While you might get targeted or personalised results as a result of tracking, that is likely just a small outcome of the data collected about you. Who knows what else is being analysed or number-crunched about your online behaviour? If you read Google's privacy policy, the most notable aspect is how little it tells you. Nothing about how your data is aggregated, who sees your data, how long that data is kept for, whether it's anonymised. Is the data collected to "protect Google and our users" (their words) used solely for that purpose? (For example, providing your date-of-birth for age verification and your mobile number for two-factor authentication.) Or is this information also used for tracking and profile-building? These are all reasonable questions to ask any company that tracks you online or asks for your personal information. But Google aren't giving answers. And Google arguably tracks online behaviour more than anyone else.
[+] [-] flinkblink|11 years ago|reply
Myself, i've long used Google and hadn't cared at all what information they collect about me. Rather, i openly give them information. Sure, if the world turns to hell and suddenly the government is at my door because Google "knew too much" then the naysayers can laugh at me all they like.. Then again, the world has turned to hell already, so is it really a time to laugh?
In the mean time, i want to give Google my info, because "Google Now" is a great example of a service attempting to predict my needs. Keeping up to date with my life, and giving me information i want, without having to even ask for it. I don't want dumb computers, i want intelligent meaningful interactions, tailored to my life. And i can't get that by being a black box.
[+] [-] Spearchucker|11 years ago|reply
I interact on my terms, or not at all.
[+] [-] Semaphor|11 years ago|reply
That's the reason I always come back to google and search logged in. Almost all my searches are computer or more generally electronic related. On other search engines I get useless results.
[+] [-] skierscott|11 years ago|reply
I'm fine with relationship building. Google can give me better search results based on other activity they observe; I'm perfectly fine with that. They're simply trying to better their product for the user.
What I'm not fine with is the fact that Google is an advertising company. We're not the end-users, we're the product. Intuition says Google is selling the valuable information they collect to third-party advertisers. This means that our valuable information is being leaked to third parties I'm not sure I can trust.
At the core of it, I only want to give my information out to parties I trust. I don't care if it's valuable information or not, I just want to be in control. I don't want my info being sold to some advertising company -- after all, I'll only buy their product after I build a relationship with Google and they can provide the most relevant links.
[+] [-] GhotiFish|11 years ago|reply
If someone came up to me and said "I'll give you 5 dollars if you give me the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and personal vulnerabilities of all your friends", agreeing to that would be considered a massive breach of trust and a horrible act. On the web it seems like standard procedure.
I will give you that tracking isn't innately bad, but it is an act of trust, and the question is: do you trust google?
[+] [-] eevilspock|11 years ago|reply
Google is accountable. The problem is that they are accountable to advertisers, currently to the tune of about $55 billion per year.
For consumers to hold Google accountable, they have to fight against their addiction to free web content and services, and start directly paying for what they consume. It's important to note that "Google is free!" is an outright lie, and in fact we are paying more for Google through advertising than if we just paid straight up[1].
> We should instead be spending our breath advocating for greater accountability in the system as a whole.
The best way to do that is to advocate against ad-supported websites and services, and to advocate (and invent if missing) honest ways to get necessary revenue[2].
-
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
[2] I avoid the term "monetization" which to me is a word invented to make it easier to be dishonest.
[EDIT] Sigh. As usual, either Google or advertising apologists are downvoting without supplying a reason. Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Too many people here have a salary dependent on advertising, or an identity dependent on Google fanboyism.
[+] [-] SeanDav|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonogo|11 years ago|reply
"Relationships" are built by two people, not by one person being followed around the entire interney by a multibillion dollar international conglomerate.
[+] [-] sroerick|11 years ago|reply
Not to accuse you of anything, but I would imagine that this is what most stalkers think, as well.
[+] [-] quadrangle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|11 years ago|reply
Really? For that exact query, I get the Wikipedia page for "Salt (Cryptography)", "How to Hash Passwords", and "Salt the Hash - Security tutorial"... you get the idea[0].
AFAIK, the stuff you're seeing at the top is their 'zero click' information, which Google never provided (until after DDG added it and promoted it as a selling point). That's a little hit-or-miss, sure, but the actual search results of DDG are generally just as relevant.
I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for years now - I still resort to "!g" searches sometimes, but I have to do it far less than I used to.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/qt2Xpfm.png
[+] [-] siculars|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brave-new|11 years ago|reply
By letting Google collect enormous amounts of data about you, you are letting them have power over you. It can be used for pushing you to buy stuff against your rational will or for killing you, if say at any point you decide to not fully cooperate with a future totalitarian government.
[+] [-] vram1994|11 years ago|reply
With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about - Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google.
That's the issue here.
[+] [-] twobits|11 years ago|reply
You are very naive. Nature hates a power vacuum. Accountability, requires being able to enforce, if the other party is not accountable. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before you are being used in some, or many, ways. The asymmetry of power between Joe Doe, you, and a huge multi national, assures that you can't enforce, and so you can't keep the other party accountable.
[+] [-] icantthinkofone|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|11 years ago|reply
"Like most people, I don't like to be tracked"
and understand
"tracking is, a priori, something bad, even when it's open and part of a relationship in which you appreciate the other party remembering certain things about you"
?
[+] [-] boling11|11 years ago|reply
Looking at the underlying business model is more effective. I am confident that DDG is going to respect my privacy, because that's what their whole business is built on! Similarly, I would be shocked if Apple turned around and started selling my data to advertisers, because I am their customer and I am the one paying them.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
And how do those companies stack up against Google when it comes to security? It's one thing to protect the data against snooping by the provider, it's anoter to protect it from everyone else. Google is pretty solid, often on the cutting edge (PFS, certificate pinning).
[+] [-] elliottpayne|11 years ago|reply
But, as far as most of the criticisms posted here, they're really unfounded. If you want to be a purist about privacy, you really have to just quit using technology. It's not realistic. Yes, you can be an idealist and try to run your own email server, etc. but it's really about balancing tradeoffs. I also use Apple maps and iCloud and dropbox and Evernote and... many other services we should give just as much scrutiny to as Google.
I don't see my choices as being about riding a high-horse, it's about a diversified portfolio of services that helps me avoid total lock-in. The day that google heavily oversteps with the G+ product strategy or twitter completely goes to shit, I've got a series of alternative services that can pick up the slack.
[+] [-] toxican|11 years ago|reply
I don't really see it as a question of if Google will screw up with people's data, it's a question of when.
[+] [-] boling11|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
Exactly. It's not realistic because it's a strawman, and a disingenuous one at that.
No one really wants to be a "purist" about privacy. Indeed, the only way to live a 100% private life is to have a cabin on some uncharted island and never leave it.
Rational people, on the other hand, realize that there are certain privacy costs to living in modern society. They simply want to make informed decisions about which benefits to trade off those costs for.
What the author advises against is giving all your information to one company, i.e. Google. This holds especially true since said company's core business is serving you advertisements and generally controlling your Internet experience (using the "personal filter bubble" described in the article) using the information it has about you. Instead, he is suggesting that people spread their information across multiple service providers so that no single one of them can compile it to get a wholesome picture of who you are. The point is not to avoid giving your personal information (although the less you have to give, the better). The point is to avoid putting all of it in the hands of one company.
[+] [-] Oletros|11 years ago|reply
Maps: ... / Apple for directions on mobile
Phone OS: iOS
Calendar: iCloud
And then talks about data not given to one company.
Really, is it just a strange joke?
[+] [-] chimeracoder|11 years ago|reply
I recently migrated to Fastmail, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. Fastmail automatically imports your emails from Gmail, and it took me so little time that I kicked myself for not doing it before.
> Calendar: iCloud
For those of us who don't use both OS X and iOS, this isn't feasible. Fortunately, though, Fastmail also provides a calendar service. It synchronizes with Google Calendar in case you still need to use Google (e.g. for work), and it was also a seamless switch.
As for a client, I was very surprised by this, but I've actually found that the latest version of Mozilla Lightning[0] is the best calendar interface. Fastmail's is okay, but still in beta (it's less than a year old). Setting up Lightning to sync with Fastmail's calendar took just a minute, and I actually like the interface more than I liked Google Calendar's[1].
Thunderbird is an okay mail client (not a terrible interface, but not a great one), but even if you don't use Thunderbird for mail, I would recommend trying out Lightning for calendaring.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_%28software%29
[1] It's okay for viewing events in the week view, but there are a lot of UI quirks and bugs that catch up with you after daily use - this one is the most pernicious, but there are a number that are simply annoying as well: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-google-calendar-... [2]
[2] Since I know people will ask - I consider this a UI issue because it's fairly easy to imagine a minor UI improvement that would indicate this unexpected result of Quick Add (and others) before clicking "Add" without sacrificing this functionality in case it is desired.
[+] [-] hoopism|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ape4|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvillani|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] napoleond|11 years ago|reply
As for calendar, I've heard good things about https://fruux.com/ although I haven't tried that myself yet. (And apparently Fastmail does calendar too--again, haven't tried.)
[+] [-] alpatters|11 years ago|reply
Ads that follow you has absolutely nothing to do with Google services. These are retargeting companies using their cookies to track you. They use ad exchanges, so even that is not principally Google.
[+] [-] MichaelGG|11 years ago|reply
But... DuckDuckGo just doesn't compete on search results. I changed to it as my default search engine, but I ended up going to Google most of the time.
And switching away from Android... I tried to move to Windows 8 / Phone, but the ecosystem is a joke. Desktop apps don't work well on their small tablet form factor, and the Metro apps are laughably terrible. Microsoft can't even prevent total scams, like $9 fake Netflix and HBO. And they ignore reports about them.
[+] [-] rizumu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wstrange|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|11 years ago|reply
What changed is that I have retired (except for some mentoring and writing). Now, I would like the tech side of my life to be as simple as possible in order to free up my time for other activities. So for right now I am massively using Google services but I am considering, depending on how much I like the iPhone 6, just living in Apple's little walled garden. I trust both Apple and Google to generally do the right things.
I still advise friends and family to run Adblock software, and to be generally prudent privacy and security wise. But for me personally privacy issues are not as important as they once were.
[+] [-] dan_bk|11 years ago|reply
(Almost) nobody can escape the tracking, as long as fingerprinting remains possible: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Google's/Facebook's/Twitter's JS scripts are literally on every site. Fingerprinting allows them to increase their ROI since it builds more precise profiles on you. The advertising industry is happy and the government is happy. So forget about them not fingerprinting you.
[+] [-] nodata|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|11 years ago|reply
Benefits over Vimeo: FOSS, deployable on your own servers, pro-privacy, also supports audio and images.
I helped make it, so take this with a grain of salt.
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|11 years ago|reply
thanks but no thanks
[+] [-] acheron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] awhitty|11 years ago|reply
0 - http://skimfeed.com/
[+] [-] mgreg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ximpathy|11 years ago|reply
each story is an aggregation of multiple sources