[notatoad]

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

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

[malloc2x]

generally an honest and upstanding ad network

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

[notatoad]

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

[malloc2x]

s/politics/<reason_of_the_day>/

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

[mickt]

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

[Evbn]

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

[malloc2x]

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

[dredmorbius]

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

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

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

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

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