It's not that hard to do without Google, except for search. My phone has all Google user-facing services removed. Mail is on an Sonic IMAP server and accessed with K-9 mail. Browsing is is with Fennec. Apps come from F-Droid. Navigation is based on Open Street Map. GPS assistance comes from Mozilla's location provider. No Facebook on mobile. Messaging is SMS and email.
On desktop, documents are in Libre Office. Privacy Badger blocks most of the junk. Browsing is with Firefox. Mail is via Thunderbird, talking to the same IMAP server. Haven't looked at Facebook this week yet.
ISP is Sonic.net, which just moves bits, and doesn't MITM anything. They're pro net neutrality.
Part of the issue the article notes is: once you start with Google (or any large, interconnected service ecosystem), there's quite a bit of activation-energy cost to leaving it.
Consider Drive as an example. You can download the entire contents of your Drive at any time. Where do you upload it to? How many services will provide a clean and easy way to import all Drive documents? Will they maintain folder hierarchy? Individual files in Drive can also be shared with zero, a few, or all users with a given URL---can your new collaborative document editing tool be set up to manage that state? Is it automatable, or something you'll have to set up by hand for 10s - 100s - 1000s of documents?
This is the kind of thing an enterprise can pay someone to sort out, but individual users really have to care about leaving a service family (that one assumes at some point in the past they were already happy with the privacy / security tradeoff) to invest the time and effort to do so without data or functionality loss.
Based on the article title ("Why no one really quits Google or Facebook"), your experience doesn't align with the scenario the article is talking about; it's scoped to people who already adopted these service ecosystems.
The people who feel that they cannot quit Facebook seem to think that quitting Facebook means replacing it with something else. Most people who have quit do not move 2000 contacts to new platforms - they simply stop using Facebook.
What you describe sounds exactly like giving up privacy to me, even if it doesn't sound like giving up privacy to you.
And then when you add in all the other tracking that Google does of your web history, search history, location data, that is pretty much all your privacy gone.
Let's say I pay an assistant to help with my email. Even though they are in my employ, I'm still giving up my privacy for the service. Google gives us email service in exchange for that peek in to our private lives.
In essence, yes. Except the human assistant could technically be coerced to spill the beans on you. Via bribes or blackmail, etc.
Gmail dosen't. The ads you see have nothing to do with your mail activity. They haven't for a while now. Not saying Google is a paragon of privacy, mind you.
Leaked to whom though? That's what I don't get. No human is involved in the process and your information is in the hands of the same company as before.
That's a lot of trust in a black box coded by humans. What's going on under the hood with their Smart Compose? Smart Reply? Smart Labels? It all requires processing very very personal information, and you simply can't vet whether it's all handled securely.
Ok so then you need to invent a new word for what is lost when companies further cross the line from [using your data in a totally internal and in fact internal to just your account]. Because it seems like a big step from treating your data as a tool to affect your experience to selling it to other companies to do whatever they want with. What is the primary word associated with that step if not "privacy"?
Yes, developers can request permission to access your inbox "offline" (i.e. at any time, with a long-term access token). The scope is clearly identified in the OAuth authentication process, and the consent screen clearly asks for permission to (IIRC) "read, write, and delete emails." There are a few well-known applications (Earny and Unroll.me come to mind, off the top of my head) that are known to work with consumer research operations with the resulting data.
I am so far willing to give up some small amount of privacy for free email, though I'd also pay Google for it because it is simply the best email hosting I could find. I don't want to host my own email, hosting email sucks. I've tried other email hosters and they just weren't as good. They also have security in place that takes care of all the big things in my threat model.
So when it comes to email... yeah, it's not as private as it could be, but it's about the best I can find for everything else. It ain't perfect, but it's the best option for me right now. Maybe it won't be in a year or two?
lmao, or: it is actually hard to quit these companies even if you're educated, well-informed, and set to do it. Aside from many articles[1] written precisely about this, casual conversations with anyone who tries to exercise their consumer agency and giving them up talk about why it's hard to do.
Has this author ever spoken to anyone who's tried using a smartphone or OS that isn't Apple or Google? "People love free stuff" isn't a sufficient explanation, it reads like someone trying to blame consumers, to say nothing of the ethical implications behind the conscious, deliberate decisions behind each of the scandals they're happy to wave away.
> But after more than a decade of abuse, we should look deeper at our analysis and perhaps conclude that these issues aren’t abuse at all, but rather a bargain, a negotiation, and one that people are quite willing to live with.
No. We shouldn't conclude anything. The author gives the mass market way too much credit in knowing the extent of tracking, data-harvesting, data-sharing, MITM access (ie, ISPs, cell companies), the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, the backdoor collusion with government and an entrenched news media that has a vested interest in protecting their ad revenue.
In the grand sleazy scale of things, they are nearly ignorant compared to knowledgeable: basing their consumerism on PR statements, selfies and memes. It remains for most of them... A Brave New World.
Would a solution to Facebook's monopoly be allowing other companies to interface into their systems and databases as it's more of a public good than a private one people can reasonably opt out of?
So I'd expect something like a company coming out allowing you to do everything Facebook does and use the same data with events and everything, but that does not ask you to give away your data.
The irony, of course, is that when you open TechCrunch in the EU the first thing you see is a GDPR disclaimer saying “hey we’re gonna collect your data to do whatever we want with”, which 95% of consumers will just click through. This isn’t a Google or Facebook problem as much as it is an internet problem.
clickbaity title, it's article actually about lazy people, I quit Facebook completely and pretty much Google besides search in browser, so not sure what's the point of article
> Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.
I still fundamentally disagree with Europe's stance on data ownership. If I collect data on a person in a public location, I believe I own that data, not the person. If a person walks into my store and I take a picture of them, I don't believe I've "stolen" anything from them, nor do they have the right to demand I give them a copy of the picture I took and delete the picture from my hard drive. This fantasy world where everyone should be able to be perfectly anonymous and erase all evidence of their existence anytime they want is a bad idea. There has to be a balance between publicly available information and private information. If you are in a public location, I should be able to glean information from observations.
This was ok before the aggregation came. My presence on the street at point X,Y at time T is public information and I don't object to it being captured once, say, by a tourist taking a photo. But aggregated over a week at 10 second intervals? That's a breach of privacy.
Why should I need their permission when it is a public location? If they don't want to be photographed naked in public, don't go around naked in public.
If I'm a skilled artist and I see a person naked in public without their permission, am I allowed to recall those thoughts and recreate the image in my mind onto paper using my artistic dexterity? Or am I breaking some privacy law by doing so?
I think the question of who owns it is normative, since ownership itself is just a legal/social construct. The question is which policy leads to a better world. On that front, I tend to agree with you. There are few people who will be materially happier or better off from GDPR, and it does close off some analysis that would be beneficial to business. If business is hurt and no one is helped, I call that a net negative.
But, it is the law of the land, and unlikely to change in the near future. Lots of things are suboptimal and I’m not sure GDPR is very close to the top of my list. So you get over it and move on.
On desktop, documents are in Libre Office. Privacy Badger blocks most of the junk. Browsing is with Firefox. Mail is via Thunderbird, talking to the same IMAP server. Haven't looked at Facebook this week yet.
ISP is Sonic.net, which just moves bits, and doesn't MITM anything. They're pro net neutrality.
Who needs Google?