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by bmoresbest55
4416 days ago
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I think privacy needs to be looked at in a different way. We are almost always being tracked and I find that I rather enjoy using Google products. However if there is a private matter of mine that requires the Internet at all I I fire up to browser and find the information I need to find. If is it less sensitive maybe I use a private Firefox session. Then finally if I am on the Internet and know that everything I am doing is clear of privacy concerns I being up Chrome and have a great experience (less so in a recent update). Snowden didn't talk to the Guardian on a Windows machine using Google Hangouts video chat. All I am saying is at least use some sense when your privacy is concerned and that doesn't mean you have to live in an Internet corner where no one can see you. Most people are kind, I promise. |
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There are other averse effects than sacrificing privacy, which is a trade-off one could indeed make for the comfort of Google's services.
Another effect is that we are currently slowly moving towards an oligopoly when it comes to internet services. Some are intentional, such as shutting down XMPP federation, leaving us with closed ecosystems (Hangouts, Whatsapp, Skype) if you want to chat with most other friend. Others are more of a side-effect, for instance, it becomes harder and harder to run a small e-mail service, as it becomes more and more of a reputation system[1].
If we want the internet to be open for new competitors and services in the future, it's important that it doesn't become a small set of closed systems.
(I am a relatively happy user of Google's services, but I also see the dangers.)
[1] If some spammer uses GMail, it's unlikely that Outlook.com will block other e-mails coming from Google's SMTP servers. If that spammer uses Fastmail, the big players don't mind to block SMTP servers for some time. As far as I understand, this is the reason why Fastmail partitions new users together (server-wise). It's less likely five year paying customer suddenly turns into a spammer and you don't want long-term customers to become victims of a spammer, by having their SMTP server blocked.