> These services track us everywhere, while claiming to give us a better “user experience”.
That's kind of the problem though; they usually _do_ offer a better user experience.
If we want users to start using open source software rather than walled garden solutions from large companies, we're going to have to start building open source solutions which offer a comparable user experience to proprietary ones from large companies; a difficult task to say the least.
I believe this is true. But I also have found that sometimes the user experience is diminished when not "logged in" to encourage people to create accounts. Pinterest has a box that slowly covers up more of the screen as you scroll drown. Facebook has a login prompt box that stays at the bottom of the screen and occasionally expands as a reminder. Quora prevents internal redirects to new pages. With enough know-how these can be worked around but it is an effort and I often find myself making the undesirable choice between doing the work around, ignoring the content, or signing up for an account.
Right, but the simple truth is: people do it. They don't mind doing it.
Especially when the alternative is terrible user experience. The vast majority of tools named when these conversations come up are demonstrably worse from a UX perspective.
Free software does not get a pass on UX because it is free. There are many reasons why that is, but we have to recognize it is true.
Overgeneralizing a bit here. I agree than many people do, but some don't. I mind and I never create an account on websites trying those dirty tricks on me and I know a bunch of people who do the same.
Do we know that they don't mind doing it? I suspect most people don't like it, but do it anyway, because they see no practical alternative. People sure complain about Facebook a lot.
Among all the non-tech oriented people I know, the only ones that say they don't mind, do so because they feel powerless about it but "need" Facebook.
You actually need some tech knowledge to be able to rationalize this endless being pushed and shoved around like cattle as some kind of worthwhile trade-off.
UX is usually worse for non-customers because the main product offering of many online services simply cannot exist without strong relationship with customer (probably Quora is not the case). Because of that, experience of registered users receives much more attention. Most of the world is happy with it and is not going to deprive themselves from cool stuff on privacy grounds. I'd say it's counterproductive to fight against collecting personal data by corporations, because corps do need it to make service better. Instead, it should be better regulated, possibly, similarly to financial organizations by requiring independent privacy audit etc.
The forced-login isn't to improve product quality, it's to make more money on ads. StackOverflow/Exchange works great without forced login to view content.
Stack overflow works better when people provide answers and feedback on prior answers; persistent login greatly increases the chance that someone will leave a reply, which in turn helps future users.
Nope this is directly linked to ad revenues because StackOverflow don't care about them they can offer freedom. And if they ever get into financial difficulty you can count on me to subscribe to a paying "gold membership" and I still won't care if broken students get the same content for free and without login.
You never wondered why there is very few fake account on stackoverflow as compared to ad based social network?
Yep but quantity is not an ally to reach this goal, they look for people that have a good track record and are recognized by their peers. They don't care if the student that look for answers on SO is not registered.
Registering non participating members is only a trick to inflate your user base when communicating. What really matter is active users, and they will register don't worry.
Non-registered users lacking some functionality due to the lack of attention is not the problem. The problem is companies conciously making it hard for non-registered users to access the service. Deploying various annoying partial screen blockers is not the lack of attention -- it is the opposite.
For me too. Whenever I do need something from Quora I disable their register coercion with a ?share=fuckyou query param.
However, most non tech-users I know will simply enter their email and a password because it's so simple and they don't see the problem with this dark pattern.
Thank for the tip! I was stuck on that stupid register screen last week and just resigned and look elsewhere.
Maybe if I can actually have a grasp of what quora can do for me BEFORE subscribing I might someday consider joining.
PS: This is exactly the same crap for web based startup, usually the more they hide they're "sass live demo" under a trial subscribe-wall, the more I'm supspicious. Often with reason as product are shitty. When on the opposite you have a big "try me link" (and possibly even a "see the source on GitHub") I already have a good impression on the product...
i stopped using pinterest the minute i discovered they were doing this, despite already having created an account. likewise, i tend to avoid quora links. facebook i don't mind so much because it feels more like social networking than part of (what should be) the open internet.
Pinterest and Twitter really bug me. I usually hit Pinterest when doing a google image search looking for a product page to buy something. By hitting Pinterest I'm clicking through to the product page (which I would have preferred if that was my result instead), so it's not much different to me than blogspam. I really liked the idea of Pinterest and could see myself browsing and maybe eventually creating one, but the casual experience is so user-hostile I avoid it.
Twitter has been similar because their landing page has been useless (when not logged in) and no search box. Usually I hear about a tweet I want to see for myself. I'll go to twitter.com, then leave and go to Google to search for it. Looking now twitter.com has changed dramatically and now has a search box.
I, like most people, are lurkers and consumers. I lurked here for awhile and I lurk in a lot of communities. At some point I may sign up and contribute, but if my lurking experience is terrible I won't make it that far. I realize this isn't what companies want, and I guess I'm not the "normal" use-case because if I was they wouldn't have anybody sign up. I have a Twitter account, but don't see the value in signing in on every device for my casual use.
Each user will have their own reasons, but if it's a big enough deal that websites will try to strongarm users into signing up then I believe it's likely a big enough deal for users as well.
Did you even read the post? This is about avoiding tracking. And yes, signing up for accounts can be grueling. Try making a google account without submitting a blood sample.
Wat? It's been years since I created my "real" Google account, so I just created "fakeasdlkvjasklfvjasdkljfgasdf@gmail.com" out of curiosity.
It literally took 20 seconds, with a fake name and birthday. There are form fields for your phone number and alternate email address, but you can leave them blank.
bugmenot.com still works. Although an even better solution would be a browser plugin or add-on that, with one click, creates and logs in via a fake account populated with fake, throwaway info, changing every time you visit the site. Don't just avoid tracking, poison it. I'd help fund that kickstarter.
Even if you did that I think there are a lot of ways to identify you, using everything from your browsing patterns -- what sites, when and for how long -- to even just the account creation process itself; you'll still need to complete the captcha and with the "click all images that match" captchas that Google is currently using on reCAPTCHA (which btw was quite a bait-and-switch; they originally got a lot of people to use reCAPTCHA because the original purpose was to help book scanning, "read books, stop spam", remember?) as far as I've come to understand continuously sends your cursor position to Google servers, and with the movement data and the order and the timing that you press the images I would not be surprised if there was a pattern that uniquely identified you there.
Likewise websites that stream your input key by key instead of submitting the text when you press the submit button should in theory be able to easily identify you by the timing of your keypresses. I've only heard of a couple of instances of sending keys as-you-type but I think that if someone made the kind of project you spoke of above, then we would start seeing more tactics like the kinds I mention in order to counter that.
Even if you then proceed to disable JavaScript globally and only browse the web in 1.0 style with user-initiated GET and POST, the way that you write has some uniqueness to it that might be possible to identify.
I think it you want to make browsing data completely anonymous you're going to have to download a snapshot of the internet and unplug your connection. Unfortunately, that's really not the user experience most people want.
I used to think it was dependent on the IP from which you register, like whether it was a home connection or something shared with many people (like in a train or café), when obviously you'd want to use the latter (and definitely not the IP from which you've been mainly accessing your main Google account for years).
But this time I did try it from my home connection, which is in the Netherlands (though I selected "Germany" for my home country because Fravia+ has taught me well).
I wonder what makes the difference. Maybe if I had a US-based IP? Could be something with EU privacy laws. It should just clearly tell me, though.
Now, I won't whine about it when Google doesn't want to give me something for free. I will, however, whine about it when Google pretends I should hand over the thing it wants at no cost but for my own benefit. I will also whine about it when it purposefully obfuscates the cost/benefits and leaves me guessing like this. If it's a trade it wants, either be upfront about it, or be shady business.
Whether you want to opt out of tracking is irrelevant to the BS claim that it's difficult to create a google account. StevePerkins was specifically responding to the difficulty claim.
A blood sample? The only fields they ask for that might be too much for someone is a phone number and prior email, and neither is required to make an account.
I take my privacy very seriously and understand a lot of the apprehension about Google's tracking, but I think you are being a little ridiculous.
I've never been able to sign-up for a google account without entering a valid phone number. Even typing 555-5555 it will state it needs a valid phone number.
I had thought this was the case as well, but just tried signing up for a throwaway google account from the US browser homepage and it seemed to go through without a phone number or alternative email.
It probably depends on your IP address and how many accounts were registered using it (if your ISP uses NAT then many users share a single address) and maybe other factors like country etc.
You "can" sign up for gmail without a phone number (iirc it's fairly difficult, and you need to do something like use a fresh install of an android device or something to trigger the right sequence of dialogues). However if you try to use that account outside of the device, they will soon (within a couple of logins) ask you for a phone number for "security purposes," - the dialogue says something like "there is something suspicious about this login" at which point your account is linked to whatever other accounts have your phone number (unless you have an unlimited supply of burner phones). - Note that I am remembering this from when I tried specifically to create an unlinked gmail account around nov 2015-jan 2016 (I used a formatted nexus 7 to do it), so things may have changed, maybe details are slightly off from memory.
(For those who are saying it is possible, they might already know who you are based on browser cache, ip etc. Try it in incognito on a vpn. I get this:
http://imgur.com/a/Y5Cxq
That's probably the result of using a VPN. Google undoubtedly knows that lots of accounts registered through VPNs are spammy.
I just registered billyjiminy123@gmail in a private browsing session and didn't get prompted. I even sent an email without being prompted for verification.
My point about the address comparison was that if you're using Google, you're asking them to send you data. Yes, you can route all requests through a VPN, just as you have send to a P.O. box or through a courier to hide your home address from Amazon. But I question the sanity of this. If you're worried about Google knowing your IP address or Amazon knowing your mailing address, it seems generally better to simply not use them.
If you're using Gmail (or sending email to people who use Gmail), Google already knows a ton about you. They can probably guess where you live without knowing your IP. They can certainly guess where you live if you're ever searching for region-specific stores/parks/directions/etc. I suspect if you're browsing through a VPN regularly, Google has enough data to pick you out of the searches coming from the VPN's outbound IPs with fairly high confidence.
The number of times people forget their password, or accidentally type it into a phishing site, or re-use passwords across different websites where one of them (e.g. Yahoo) get breached....
Without a recovery phone number, these people are hosed - and they've lost data, photos, contacts, email, their entire digital life etc. That's a pretty poor user experience. So most people are like - yeah, OK, that sounds reasonable, let me put a phone number I can access just in case somebody hacks my account.
NB: I work for Google, but I don't speak for them here in any official capacity.
I agree with your reasoning that for the vast majority of casual users it is useful (and maybe gmail is only intended for casual users). Otoh, there are countries where you could be punished for speaking your mind via en e-mail account that is linked to you (say by phone number) or from that e-mail account being linked to you via your using it to sign up for another service. For example, in the US one could conceivably be punished (or at least face an expensive court battle) for publishing certain types of software see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States from an e-mail address linked to you
The security considerations are valid, but this is missing the point.
The point is rather that google is in the business of selling personal information, and that telephone numbers are valuable personal information. As such, some people don't trust google with this information despite the valid pretext.
Why would Google create a high barrier of entry to get you on their platform? Their entire business model is based on tracking and advertising, so they have every incentive to lower this barrier to the greatest degree possible.
Seriously? Their business is advertising and their technology depends on big data and is designed to scale, and they offer all of their services for free. It seems like they have a huge incentive to know as much as possible about as many as possible.
The question you should be asking is whether letting me see Pintrest or Quora content (for example) without an account is really that big of a deal?
FWIW, I won't sign up for those two sites specifically because of the sleazy way they get their content show up in search results, but don't let people see the content without an account once they get there.
I think this isn't necessarily about open source, it's about tracking users in order to manipulate them with relevant ads. A company could use a fully open-source stack and still cross that creepy threshold with user tracking no problem.
A few years back I was using a paid Google Apps account (which IIRC excludes you from some tracking?) and FastMail simultaneously. Both were excellent from a technical perspective, but FastMail was just better. They make all their money from selling their service to end users and I trust this model more. So I switched to using FastMail exclusively.
I use free and open source software and strongly prefer it - but I don't see it as some kind of 'automagic' solution to tracking and privacy concerns. Buying the product, and not being the product, is what is important to me.
Also don't forget to self-host what you can, for example it's not that difficult or expensive to set up Nextcloud on a VPS for file and contacts/calendar syncing. And don't be a cheap bastard with the FOSS you use, make donations to developers of useful tools. You're going to pay for all this one way or another.
I personally believe the approach proposed by Daplie is the way forward, not only because it allows users to take back control of their own data, but also because you don't have to give up on a friendly user experience to do so:
I knew https://sandstorm.io and I just went to see daplie.com: My worry with Daplie is whether the UI will be as cool as promised. Sandstorm is the same idea as Daplie without the hardware part, and already their features aren't as useful as I initially thought.
Hello! I'm AJ. I manage the website. We started the site with a cookie cutter template and left a garbage TOS and Privacy Policy in there by mistake. Someone told me about this post and so I pretty much pulled the TOS and I've been working through the Privacy Policy too. Consider this a draft, would love your feedback on github issues: https://github.com/daplie/daplie.com/
I think it's a mixed bag. Real life example, my mom is flying in today for a visit, she emailed me the flight info. Close to the time of departure my android phone that's link to my google account gave me a push notification about it's status which it regularly updates in case there is any delay. Is this a little creepy? To me, yes. Is it also useful? Yep.
This. I'm not sure if the other user means better experience with the services Google et al. offers or if he directly means how Google/Facebook/etc. cater ads/search results/friend suggestions to your web behavior. If it is the latter, then I personally want none of it and I get creeped out in much the same way as meeting a stranger who knows a little too much about me.
Privacy _is_ part of the user experience, but only insofar as users actually care about that particular feature.
Most users I believe do consider privacy a positive, but often it's a low priority compared to other "more important" features like convenience and usability.
That's because you omit to factor in the tracking and everything that comes with it. When you add advertising, profiling, censorship, surveillance and worse suddenly the experience is not so desirable anymore.
We get tricked into it because the consequences of tracking are not immediately obvious and often delayed, (and a handful of cognitive biases) but it is still part of the user experience.
For the users where this downside is obvious because they've been jailed, silenced, murdered the user experience is arguably not better.
It's not only about tracking, Wanna talk about the user experience of google reader to cite one famous example of google's better user experience ?
> For the users where this downside is obvious because they've been jailed, silenced, murdered the user experience is arguably not better.
So we need a site that takes this into perspective and educates users.
The "true" value of tracking = [user benefits][number of users] - [mad regime oppressing people][oppressed people]
How bad is the oppressing? How great are the benefits? What's the correct mental model for evaluating this? What would happen without tracking? What's the value of the alternatives?
"Open source" is irrelevant here; the issue is whether services are part of the surveillance economy. Google search is sometimes better than DuckDuckGo, possibly because they can afford more crawling, and sometimes worse because you need to try to out-smart their algorithm to escape your personal filter bubble. Neither company is "open source," but DDG has a simple, non-invasive business model: they show ads based on search terms.
The most crucial thing for the future of information freedom is to fix American intellectual property and network access laws.
"Walled gardens" exist because anyone who effectively frees a user's data on the user's terms is at least sued, if not jailed, under statutes like the Soviet-era, pre-Internet Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and luddite interpretations of the Copyright Act that consider a RAM copy that exists for milliseconds an infringement.
Allow coders to make it easy to cart your data around and suddenly the major tech incumbents will have to compete on merit instead of merely holding your data hostage, which is exactly what they don't want. The powerful make laws to prevent others from challenging their power.
If we update copyright and the CFAA to address conventional internet use (from the user's perspective, not the corporate giants who were quick to legislate themselves a safe harbor with the DMCA) and constrain the scope of browsewrap and clickwrap agreements to reasonable liability disclaimers, we'll have no problem maintaining a vibrant and accessible marketplace for user-facing services.
The user obviously retains copyright on whatever he posts/uploads to fb/twitter/etc. If the user grants you permission, IP laws cannot be used to stop you.
The CFAA did indeed come into play with the guy who wanted to automate Facebook profile transfers. But apart from the questions of that specific case, it's just not true that there are millions of people waiting to migrate away from Facebook if only they could transfer their photo library.
Most of the value in these networks is in "network effect", i. e. it's usefulness is a function of the number of other people using it.
And then there's good old "this service is actually pretty good". Case in point: Gmail. It's quite easy to move away from it: you can download all your data via SMTP and set up forwarding or an autoresponder. That people do not do so has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories. They actually like the service.
>Most of the value in these networks is in "network effect", i. e. it's usefulness is a function of the number of other people using it.
No, the only reason "network effects" matter on something that is useful specifically because it makes the transfer of information instantaneous and fluid is because we have artificial barriers (CFAA/IP) in place to keep that data stuck with one vendor.
Without this, the number of people using Facebook to access Person Data would be transparent to the average user, much like the number of people using Chrome or Firefox to access hypertext. And much like Chrome and Firefox, the switching penalty would be reasonably surmountable for most users. It's the difference between learning a new interface to the data (as in switching from Chrome) and being cut off from the data completely (as in switching from Facebook).
SaaS sites have network effects specifically because we (accidentally) legislated those effects into existence. There are no physical barriers locking people in -- the "wall" of this garden is entirely artificial.
>"Walled Gardens" have nothing to do with IP laws.
>If the user grants you permission, IP laws cannot be used to stop you.
This is 1000% false. IP laws absolutely CAN and HAVE been used to stop people from accessing online resources, even to get information that the user has authorized the data gatherer to collect. That's because when you download a page from one of the major tech services, you're not just downloading the user's copyrighted content to which the host has a license, you're also downloading the host's copyrighted code and parsing through it to extract the user's requested data.
That's been interpreted to be an infringement under the Copyright Act on multiple occasions: Ticketmaster v. RMG, Facebook v. Power Ventures, Perfect 10 v. Amazon (in which the judges ruled Google's use fair on appeal, because it was Google), and others. While you may be able to argue there's an implied license if the robots.txt is blank, that is only going to last you through the first notification that the host doesn't like your activity, which is not necessarily formal (cf. Craigslist v. 3Taps), which would matter both for CFAA and copyright purposes. It's not an issue limited exclusively to something sneaky done by Power.
Even if IP law itself was irrelevant (and it's not), there would be a lot of work to do here just in fixing up the laws around network access and blocking onerous Terms of Use.
>it's just not true that there are millions of people waiting to migrate away from Facebook if only they could transfer their photo library.
Whether you believe someone could do a better job than Facebook or not, surely you don't believe it should be, for all practical intents and purposes, illegal for them to attempt to do so.
>That people do not do so has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories.
Please try to start this type of service and get back to me about "conspiracy theories" after a C&D destroys your business, as it has hundreds of others, including mine.
Not to be rude, but you clearly have never dealt with this in a serious manner. Please be more careful before you go around making assumptions and dismissing the perspective of those with direct experience.
Freedom is wonderful, but we have a saying in the USA (from a famous court case): the rich as well as the poor are free to sleep under bridges. The meaning of this is that freedom without good resources is not actually that great.
After all, you could be completely free from Google and every other technological capitalist firm right now by throwing away your computer, phone and so on, and returning to ink and paper for your communication requirements. But of course you don't want to do that because it would entail a terrible loss of convenience, and every time you needed some information you would be forced to make a trip to the library or bookstore, or ask someone else to find the information for you etc. etc.. There is nothing ethically or psychologically bad about such a life - many of us are old enough to remember growing up that way - but it will put you at a severe economic and social disadvantage compared to virtually all of your peers.
In theory, I agree with you (and I mean that on many levels; I'm a devoted fan of Michel Foucault, for example). But I cannot eat theory, even if you consider it to be delicious cake.
Alan Kay and a couple of friends built an entire system in 2.8MB in 1998[1].
You can actually DO stuff with these techs: "How Smalltalk Enables World Record Breaking Performance"[2]
Guys behind V8 are smalltalkers.
Nothing "theoretical" here, just science.
I do not care about pompous theory.
For example, I do not believe in real numbers.
I let "theory" to poets and most academics.
Many people here are politely explaining to you that these tools have great intentions but that they are poorly designed, and you respond with irrelevant assertions about performance records. It is as if people tell you that a velo is unsuitable for construction work, and you respond with praise of Romain Bardet.
This discussion is about 'Free, Decentralized, Ethical Internet built on Solidarity.' Who cares about record-breaking Smalltalk performance? It is irrelevant. None of your contributions to this discussion have added anything of value.
> So, the "design" of the iPad is superior to the "design" of the Dynabook?
Yes. For the audience in question the iPad is in fact a design superior in every dimension except perhaps the child who wants to write a long form novel and already knows how to physically touch type.
> Patronizing and blind or high priests of the "rentware" cult.
I highly doubt this forum is prepared or inclined to have a conversation about your orthodoxy or how market forces interact with it. Certainly I'm done.
I do not want ideology. I want tangible results that will improve the freedom, privacy and safety of the western world. Quite frankly, Google does more for this right now than any 3 open source competitors to gmail do, combined.
Open source is irrelevant in most fields of user-facing software because they have insisted on being irrelevant. And any time a group forms a structure to do better, they're ceaselessly attacked by the community and given increasingly worse components to build off of.
Your contribution is very interesting : it shows how little a diploma (a.k.a. "education") has to do with any kind of ability to produce anything useful.
I like the idea of this project, but I have several nits/concerns:
- De-Google-ify is a poor way of marketing these ideas. Your average web user loves Google because they are trendy and make everything so convenient.
- The site enumerates the pitfalls of cloud-hosted solutions and then proceeds to link to their own cloud-hosted solutions with no explanation of why they're any safer, better, etc.
And not limited to this page, but I really wish in general there was a better way to convey the point of free software than the word "free." If every single person immediately misunderstands what you mean, you've already lost.
Many average users I know think Google is the Internet. 10 years ago, they thought that Internet Explorer is the Internet. They don't really care, the same way most people don't care what's the manufacturer of the bus that takes them to work every morning. They just want to get stuff done, get information they need and go on with their lives.
Whether Google makes some money with their data, or nobody makes money because it's all open source, wouldn't change a thing. Even if such change happened, the average user would just say: Okay. And go on with their life as before.
This. You know why Microsoft made Windows 10 auto-update? Because people like my father would put off updating forever. Because they don't care about security or privacy from hackers, let alone Google/MS/FB or the government. They just don't care.
You know how some developers end up making big balls of mud because they don't care and they just want to solve the current Jira issue right now? That's how your relatives's PCs got so shit. They just want to do a thing with the computer right now, and don't care about the long-term consequences or the bigger picture.
> Many average users I know think Google is the Internet.
yep. i mention this a lot, but it's scary how well Google has done in the education market these days. Kids (at least all of the 0-6th graders I know) equate all things Google with "the internet." They know nothing that isn't Gmail. To them, "Gmail" IS email. They know no video sites besides YouTube. They go for Google Maps. Even on mobile devices where Google is the default search engine, it still feeds you Google services before anything else. Notice how on the iPhone, you can't copy & paste an address from a web search into Maps? Nope. It opens web version of Google Maps and prompts you to download the app.
The average user is going to say, and often times because they have no idea how to leave. Google is keeping them there.
Google also is naming their products the English word and basically taking ownership. So Google Photos becomes Photos. Google Home instead of something like Echo. Google WiFi instead of OnHub.
But we are capitalist and Google is using the system in a smart way to grow their business.
So Google is a verb and now they will own more and more English nouns.
I can not fault Google.
On privacy and service capabilities. It is also about choice. If you are not concerned with Google having your data as you feel it does allow improved offering then you should be able to.
I get some think willing to share your private data is insane there are some of us that that would like companies like Google to do more with the data. If I am going to get an ad I prefer one on the NSX Acura than a tampons ad.
I've long felt that RMS/FSF's very specific and nonintuitive usage of "free" was intended to be misleading. If someone says "free" (which has many, many different meanings, all positive) when they really mean "copyleft" (which has one very complicated meaning), they're not trying to clarify anything, rather they're trying to muddy the waters so that people who don't understand copyleft or the FSF's political philosophy might think it's much simpler and much less specifically (and restrictively) defined than it actually is. Even the phrase "free as in freedom" doesn't actually disambiguate it, as it's a very specific type of very atypically defined freedom.
It always felt like a certain type of PR strategy, where the intent is to intentionally mislead people who aren't paying close attention, and that's always rubbed me the wrong way. Source: observing 3 decades of neverending confusion, flamewars, and arguments over this very topic.
It's less confusing when you focus on the 'freedom of the users'.
Maybe that's the part of the message that's been most lost over the years. Focusing so much on free/libre that the group to which it applies (everyone (else), end users) is forgotten.
Freedom for the users is the empowerment to treat ideas and expressions of ideas as simply that. A restoration to the laws of nature which make the cost of copying an idea merely seeing it in action.
Yes, that brings hard questions to the table as well. However my answer to those is mostly that works covered as free/libre software should be public works. Common infrastructure that everyone is supposed to have access to. An open and level playing field for the advancement of education and the useful arts of science. They should also provide a useful platform for more transitory productions like games and videos.
People walking around with smartphones just don't think of themselves as "users of software," though that's exactly what they are.
It's unclear wording. It's also not the most immediate and intuitive concept for people outside the industry to wrap their heads around.
Think about driving a car. You're driving a car, you need to know about stuff like having a license and gas and insurance and so on, i.e. the things that a "driver" or "motorist" is generally responsible for.
Obviously, no license needed for having a smartphone, and all you really need is a charger to keep it going, which is part of why there's nothing nudging people to that conceptual leap of being "a user of software".
We could do better, but there's an industry-wide revulsion to finding the right language for communicating with your people, i.e. marketing.
I used to be a big advocate of "free software" as distinct from "open source," but after spending a few years in the marketing side of the industry, I don't give a shit at all about that distinction, because neither does anyone who isn't already drowning in the kool aid.
No, it's really not. If I'm an end-user who wants to do something, and you tell me that what I want isn't available for my own good (because anyone who built it would be violating my freedom), I'm going to at best think you're being disingenuous. And might want to punch you in the face a bit.
>It's less confusing when you focus on the 'freedom of the users'.
No it isn't. The entire purpose of the GPL is to restrict the freedom of the users. Public domain gives freedom to the users. Everything else adds restrictions. And it is all a big argument about which restrictions are "good" in the eyes of the people arguing.
Supposedly it is because the word libre isn't recognized well enough in English.
Quoting: "To emphasize that “free software” refers to freedom and not to price, we sometimes write or say “free (libre) software,” adding the French or Spanish word that means free in the sense of freedom. In some contexts, it works to use just “libre software.”"
And: "We stand for freedom, and we show it every time—by saying “free” and “libre”— or “free (libre)”."
> Perhaps liberty software or liberal software would work
Parts of both of those terms have negative connotations in the US. They'd probably be fine everywhere else, but in the US, they'd be really damn polarizing.
Sure, that's a common line. But the fact that such an explanation is necessary at all is a pretty strong indicator that the label "free" is a poor one.
I don't think RMS was being deliberately obtuse, I think he was just trying to be too clever by half, and making stupid puns. Think about it. The same guy that thought, "If we have 'free speech', why not 'free software'?" is the same guy that thought "Not 'copyright', 'copyleft'!", which doesn't even make any sense.
He does this stuff all the time, he's always used language in a very Orwellian manner. It's much easier to promote "freedom" (which means all sorts of things to different people, all of them positive) than it is to promote copyleft and all that it entails. Everybody loves freedom right? But it is obfuscating, hence the neverending confusion about exactly what he means when he uses terms like "free", "freedom", and "free software".
In general, he seems to be almost obsessively sensitive to how the words used to frame ideas can influence someone's feelings towards those ideas ("GNU/Linux"...). Which of course is true, words are very important. However, he channels this obsession with words towards obfuscation rather than clarity. He's very fond of always using derogatory puns for things he doesn't like in his essays, or incorrect acronym expansion. For example, always referring to DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management"- apropos and humorous as it may be, for me it's hard to not feel like he's treating his audience like children and thinks they can be influenced by wordplay. He has expended an utterly tremendous amount of energy over the past 3 decades scolding people for using incorrect terminology, when in fact the confusion over terminology almost entirely comes from him trying to redefine common terms, or him trying to change the term people commonly use to refer to something to another term that carries some sort of loaded meaning.
It's a rhetorical technique, but it's a particular type of rhetorical technique that has always raised massive red flags for me, regardless of who is using it or for what purpose.
I also feel like we should perhaps be grateful that it's Google that's powerful here. I know they are know longer the company that 100% embraces "Don't be evil" but I still believe they are trying. It's just that this amount of success, their market(s) and political pressure will steer any company towards "profit > privacy". If you accept this, Google might be one of the better companies to experience this from as some of the other contenders like Yahoo, Microsoft seem to go through this process more rapidly and without much consideration.
To sum up my thoughts: while I don't like the direction they seem to be going i'm glad they're the one leading.
I might add that their services seem to default to French locale for some reason (I guess they're french) with no obvious way to change that.
The average internet user is probably going to understand French as well as they understand the philosophical implications of eating a slice of toasted bread with butter on it.
Having seeing them talk at a local event, that's the point. Not to replace Google with their service. To replace Google with many, anyone's service interchanging data. Having another Google is not the point. Having many isp that also host decentralized services are, tailored to their locale and habits. Like, er the Internet.
Your average user does not love Google. They love accuracy. Yes, the result is the same (GOOG lockdown), but that does not mean there isn't concern about the homogenization of the Internet. Most non-coder people I know have become forcibly aware of the fact that a Google search sees a correlated ad barrage for the subsequent week. Thus if somebody can compete technically (hard, I know), then there is a very real opportunity here.
Going even further, arguably this is becoming a political issue. If that is the case, then there is a case to take some of Google's knowledge and socialize it. After all, the information from the network effects, may well belong to society, not to a private corporation.
>The site enumerates the pitfalls of cloud-hosted solutions and then proceeds to link to their own cloud-hosted solutions with no explanation of why they're any safer, better, etc.
It's unlikely to happen as the vast majority of the public simply does not care. There is a deep technological disconnect.
The only way to de-google-ify is to bring about mesh network that runs on our mobile devices or volunteer run nodes. Maybe you need to take the Skytrain to a remote part of the city to access specific information because there are no nodes there yet.
The centralized infrastructure created between telecom companies which inevitably under the control of you know who makes it very difficult to be truly decentralized and free ourselves from corporations that provide a better user experience. It's tougher to do on a decentralized platform but I fear that it will do little to sway herd behavior-vast majority of the population are clueless about the underlying technology and can't be bothered. That might change in the future but for now, it's the people who are unwilling to make a change, especially outside of HN and tech circles that is the big challenge.
A bigger campaign that really sells the value of de-google-ify is going to take lot of resources and earn the ire of Google who is unlikely to support their own demise.
I think the public doesn't care for a good reason; no one has articulated a realistic, tangible cost to quality of life caused by letting Google track you. Lots of people talk about it being 'creepy' and dreaming up possible scenarios where it WOUDLD be costly, but for most people, the costs simply aren't actually felt.
I am trying to think about it for me personally, and I can't come up with a single time that Google tracking me has had a negative impact on my life. I know people have examples for themselves, but none resonate with me as being something I am at risk for.
Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?
They can change your perception of anything, leading you to buying stupid shit you don't need, or to voting for somebody that doesn't protect your interests.
And any piece of knowledge is dangerous in the right context. This is usually felt more strongly by minorities. You're actually privileged if you're a straight, white, middle class male, but even so you can end up being harassed and hurt for who you are. Have you ever cheated on your wife? Have you ever spoken against powerful men? Do you walk funny?
I was born in 1982, so I caught a couple of years of communist in Romania. And let me tell you, the atmosphere, the paranoia, the secret service of a police state managing to change the fabric of society by using a huge network of informants and fear was far, far more interesting than the 1984 novel.
And if you think it can't happen to you, then think again, because at least your parents were alive when such things happened for real.
A network of informants that feed information to a police state that harasses you based on that information is objectively horrible.
I think the connection of that police state to Google tracking your search and browsing history is a bit tenuous, however. Sure, if that police state existed and I lived in it, then Google's trove of information would certainly be useful to it. If I begin to believe the state that I live in is becoming that police state, I will certainly curtail my Google searching.
Of course, you might say, "But wait! You might not live in a police state now, but if your current state changes to become one, they might use your historical search history from before the rise of the police state to persecute you!"
Yes, this is true. However, they could also use my many public things I have said against me. I have said and written many things that a police state might find dangerous, and persecute me for. I can't possibly live my life trying to avoid creating any record of my life that a possible future police state could use against me. That would be impractical and possibly unfeasible. If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.
> If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.
No, that is how you prevent a police state.
I mean, obviously you don't actually live as if you already lived in a police state, but you take some of the same precautions, which all boil down to keeping power distributed.
That's the whole point of democracy, really: We make our political system deliberately inefficient by making sure that the amount of power that's concentrated in any single person's hands is limited, and the only reason we do that is to limit the damage when the wrong person gets into a position of power. If there is one thing we absolutely should have learned from history by now, it is that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous.
Also, much of this is not about individuals, and it's not black and white. Authoritarian regimes don't care about most individuals. This is about power structures in a society as a whole. A dictator wants to know the top 100000 or so individuals that could be dangerous to their power in order to be able to concentrate their efforts on keeping them under control. Even if your political disinterest is no risk at all to the dictator's power position, the fact that they can tell you apart from the dissident next door helps them staying in power. And all of that is gradual, it's all an economic question in the end: How much effort does it take to prevent everyone from successfully challenging the dictator's authority? Every additional person you need in your secret police in order to maintain your power makes things harder, everything that a computer can just tell you makes it easier.
So, you have to think not from the standpoint of an individual and what someone could do to target you specifically (which usually is impractical to protect against, and is unnecessary in a stable social structure), but from the standpoint of someone trying to gain power over a large social structure (such as a dictator in a country--but really, it's not in any way tied even to political positions, it might just as well be the head of a company trying to establish themselves as a de-facto monopoly, say), and what makes it easier for them to gain and to maintain power, and what hinders them, on the scale of the society as a whole. And you have to realize that a lot of this is path-dependent: It's a lot harder to remove a dictator once they are in place than to prevent them. So, reactionary solutions don't really work. In simple terms: You can vote a dictator in, but you can not vote a dictator out.
These all feel like hypothetical examples of potential problems to me. Yes, I have a heap of privilege, and I can understand why people might be concerned about these things, but deep down I don't believe (still!) that Adwords is something that puts these minorities at risk.
> but deep down I don't believe that AdWords is something that puts these minorities at risk
Case in point example! On Twitter Ads, I select the gender "male" for my projects. It's because my software sells twice better to males, but if everyone notices the same, it'll also mean women aren't properly informed of software options on the market. Having the gender on the ad platform provokes a discrimination by minorities.
Speaking of 1984....every few paragraphs I find myself pausing, because it feels a lot like our current world in some sense and what our future will inevitably become.
> Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?
People have lost their freedom because their Google search history was used against them in court:
Right, again, I am not saying that there aren't cases of people being harmed; however, none of those cases resonate with me because it is hard to imagine a situation where I would be harmed.
Of course, I can imagine some crazy set of coincidences that lead to be being falsely accused of a crime I didn't commit, and then by more coincidences having my random search history make me look more guilty. I am sure that will probably happen to somebody, and it will totally suck and be unfair.
The chances of it happening to me, however, seem very low; much lower, for example, than dying in a car crash when I drive to the store. I know there is a non-zero risk of dying in a car crash when I drive to the store, but it is low enough that I take the risk every week in return for the trade-off of getting groceries.
The risk of a random search of mine coinciding with a false crime I am accused of seems low enough that it won't change my behavior with how I use google.
I wasn't trying to say that at all. I am all for limiting the government's ability to subpoena or access data collected by companies about us. If we allow the government to use wide nets to try to catch criminals, they are going to catch innocent people, and that is bad.
What I am saying is that on an individual level, the risk seems low that my using google is going to end up in a bad situation for me.
It is all about which options I am choosing between. When you ask me "Is it better to allow the government to collect information about everyone, and then use that to target suspicious individuals they find in that information, or is it better to limit that data collection and risk possibly missing some criminals?", then my answer is it is better to risk missing some criminals versus most likely harassing and possibly arresting innocent people because of false positives in the massive data collected.
However, if you ask me "Is it better for you, as an individual, to use google services and let them collect data about your, or is it better to avoid google completely", then the answer to me is to use google. The direct risk to me is low enough for me to make the trade off.
> I wasn't trying to say that at all. I am all for limiting the government's ability to subpoena or access data collected by companies about us. If we allow the government to use wide nets to try to catch criminals, they are going to catch innocent people, and that is bad.
I think your trust in laws is naive. A law doesn't self-enforce. The mere existence of a law does not limit de-facto power. You can not limit an entity's power by telling it that it is required to limit its own power. That might make exercising the power illegal, but it does not take away the actual power. And you don't have to look particularly far back into history to see how governments don't care about enforcing laws against themselves when that would limit their power. A lot of the things the NSA has been doing was illegal--did that stop them from doing it? No. As a matter of fact, they could eavesdrop on google's fibers, so they did, whether legal or not. If you really want to limit the power, you have to use technical measures that actually remove the power.
Agreed. For me though, my biggest concern with having "everything" in a handful of providers. At least once a month, we get a story about someone having their account shutdown with no way to get ahold of customer service without creating a blog post and turning it into a news story.
Sure, a number of these show fault on both sides, but many do not. The recent article about an amazon seller adding a profile on his kid's kindle and getting his seller account suspended is an example. With google, having a google account suspended can remove access to your email, calendar, plus all of the linked "log in with google" accounts you have out there.
As more and more ISP implement data caps and prioritize only some traffic mesh nets and other p2p software will soon become infeasible for most users. Already with Comcast putting a 1 TB cap on my data (up+down) I'm feeling the pressure to shut down my Bitcoin full node and I've stopped contributing bandwidth to I2P.
You're right they don't care, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless. It's up to developers and companies to actually create the pure utilities the free software movement advocates, and sell it not on "freedom and decentralization," but on "our products give you more value than Google's do."
We'll never get the public to care about these things unless we silently provide them behind actually-useful products. We consumers build our lives off readily-available utilities, generally not caring about what they're doing behind the scenes, because we want a blackbox we can trust. We all want to save time and get on with our lives. So we need more companies that exist as utilities, grow their network / market share, and don't sell out at the end of the day. Of course, creating the conditions to make that happen is a whole 'nother thing :)
alternativeto is great if you are looking for a software.
degooglisons-internet.org is a non-profit that aims at hosting software for people who do not have the skill to host it themselves.
which completely defies the points they're making against google. all the cloud business runs on trust, and giving all data to newcomers doesn't sound a good plan.
I can reliably find my emails from ten years ago in Google and there is no end in sight. this other service runs on donations and expects me to believe they'll have comparable lifetime?
Not sure about them in particular but usually those initiatives also glorify open standards and the fact that even if the company disapear in 10 years, they will allow you to walk away with all your data in standard formats allowing you to continue your journey with another provider that uses this standard. Which is not obvious with some major companies using their own data models. (although I've heard of some bankrupting companies that made efforts to let users backup their datas before the end).
Every single recommendation on their list can be self-hosted. They are providing you the tools to take control of your online experience exactly so you don't have to rely on a single service provider.
And they'll happily teach you to do so. I know first hand,they started telling people to how to install open-source/free. They currently complain they're starting to be a central point. Believe me they're rms-level free, not google-level free.
Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results.
In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for "gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it was back then.
"learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.
You certainly did have to learn to use google, you just don't remember it, or remember it selectively. I frequently come across people who ask questions which seem simple to google for, but when they try ask google, they do so incompetently and get bad answers or no answers, because they fundamentally don't get keywords, how other uses of words can override your intended meaning, or how to clarify by adding further phrases, or removing extraneous detail.
My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.
> My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.
And why should she? Is she happy with the results? Google has done it's job. The keywords aren't there for you, they're there for Google so they can make searching work even if you lard up your search with unnecessary words.
You're actually more likely to get instruction-type results if you ask "natural" questions. You can test this by searching for "changing oil" and then "how do i change my oil" and comparing the results.
Teaching a child to use Google will show you that there is indeed quite a learning curve. It is not intuitive how you evaluate your results and refine your search to get good results.
I was explaining to an adult yesterday that using -x will remove x from his google results. He was stoked! Then he concluded further that he could use +x too!
That last sentence is key. Rather than force the user to structure their input based on the computer's constraints (and probably waste time learning/misunderstanding the computer's constraints), they forced the computer to (generally) output meaningful results given arbitrary user input.
Can anyone thing of examples where the free software community has successfully created software that does this? I'm thinking of VLC trying-- and often succeeding-- in playing most of the damaged files I've thrown at it. But I'm drawing a blank otherwise...
I didn't feel that I had to adapt "how to search" at all; I just had to get used to how the results looked. It took me a while to realize how much I'd associated "good search results" with the visual style of Google search results. I ended up temporarily switching to a DDG theme that mimicked the Google search result style, and I realized that doing that alone made the search results seem better.
It defies my experience to claim that DDG can have equivalent search quality to Google. For one thing Google search results include my own emails and docs, which DDG doesn't produce. I find that Google's personalization is key to quality, not counter to it. As an example search for "good espresso open now". The DDG results are entirely useless.
Generally yes. I default to DDG, but I when I don't find what I want I often just add the '!g' to the search.
The only issue I have with Google search (aside from privacy concerns and the like) is the frequency to which the results don't actually contain any of the search terms I use. This functionality is fine for general use, but when I'm actually looking for something very specific the guesses Google makes often makes the search results less helpful than nothing at all.
Well, most of the time I don't need to go to Google. But with '!g' the search defaults to encrypted mode (which you can do anyway at encrypted.google.com).
Honestly, I mostly use ddg because the bang syntax is extremely helpful. Like if I want to search hacker news posts, I just add !hn or !hackernews to the search. They also have bang searches for documentation of many languages, like !java
You can also make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Firefox' location bar. That way anything that is not a URL is treated as a search query. I particularly like !wen for Wikipedia and !wikt for Wiktionary.
> That way anything that is not a URL is treated as a search query.
And if your search query does look like a URL, you can just add the !ddg bang to it & you'll be sent to DuckDuckGo instead of having your browser try to navigate to the URL! (At least, that's the only semi-legitimate use for !ddg that I can find - when else could it be used?)
Yeah, but there is one caveat; !w will send you to the Wikipedia language matching the region DuckDuckGo is currently set at. So if you just did a search with the regional limiter set to The Netherlands, !w will send you to the Dutch Wikipedia. This is not usually what you would want for non-regional information. Without the region set it does take you to the English Wikipedia.
Firefox actually has that feature built-in. It comes preloaded with the English Wikipedia, so you can type "wikipedia <term>" to search Wikipedia for "<term>". Other searches can be added from the addon store, or by right-clicking on a search box and defining a keyword.
Do you have any examples of queries which google doesn't return any results with the search terms used? I can't even remember the last time this has happened to me so I'm curious.
I mean, it's usually very very specific things. Yesterday I was looking at a summary query of earning records for a client by the IRS. The form had tons of abbreviations for columns with no explanation as to what they mean. I basically searched for multiple variations of the column names, and I eventually found what I needed, but often I'd open a result on the first page, ctrl-f one of my search terms, and find no results.
The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
But I didn't. The whole reason Google was an overnight success was that it usually gave me what I wanted first time, instead of me needing to jump around between Yahoo, altaVista, and Lycos and use regex-type thinking all the time. I love DDG and use it regularly, but my almost 20 years of experience with Google is that 99% of the time It Just Works, and I rather appreciate that it learns from me, because often now I just give it natural language queries the way I would with a person and It Still Works. Frankly the biggest issue I have with Google is that it doesn't display sufficient self-awareness for me to have metalearning conversations with it so I can teach it specific things that I know and it doesn't, and which would be very time-consuming to teach a human.
I ask because I used DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for about three years (had it as my search engine on desktop and iOS Safari) until a few months ago. A few months ago I noticed that DuckDuckGo's results began becoming very spammy and that I was having to use Google for anything more than a trivial single keyword search. So I switched back over to Google for a few days and never went back - Instant Answers actually turned out to be not that useful, Google's result quality is miles ahead, and the !bang feature is almost redundant because browsers support search-by-site natively. I know DDG has privacy as a selling point - but it's just not important enough for me to not use an overall better search engine, as much as I root for the underdog.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for about the same time frame and have had a similar experience. At first it was painful, but at this point it's extremely rare that I can't find what I'm looking for in one search with DDG.
I switched at about the same time and now I'm hooked. Using the ! syntax to search any major site from my address bar is so damn useful I don't want to go back.
I've used DDG for awhile and been using it as my default for at least a year. However, my pattern, still, is almost always "ddg.gg foo", skim, "ddg.gg foo !g"
I'll high-five other techies who I see using it, but I just can't recommend it for the average person without first warning them you'll give up accuracy and time for privacy.
As much as I want to love DDG my experience is similar to yours. It's my default search engine too but I'm constantly having to !sp my way to good results.
The major advantage DDG has is that it doesn't matter what it is behind the scenes. They can change whenever it suits them and the site will continue to act as an anonymizing front-end, complete with some useful extras.
That's an advantage for them but it doesn't seem like an advantage to me as the user. If they change their sources behind the scenes, what I get as a user would probably change drastically.
Google was great originally because their results were not just different and better but also reliable. If the back end changes without my knowledge that gets rid of the reliability aspect.
I used altavista first, so I was used to navigating directly to what I wanted by using word combinations that would be present in my target document but explicitly NOT present elsewhere. It was great!
It's unfortunate that it comes down to this but... maybe people will use an alternative to Google when it stops looking like this: https://framadate.org/images/date.png
Unfortunately for these projects, user experience is pretty much everything. Yes people care about privacy, but obviously not enough to have to use lesser products.
I'm surprised because I wouldn't have said that Framadate's interface for voting is particularly ugly or unintuitive, compared (e.g.) to Doodle. The mobile version of the interface is crappy, but so is Doodle's.
However I have to say that Framadate's interface to set up the poll (in particular, choosing voting options) is quite unintuitive and unpleasant to use.
> The increasingly centralized online services provided by sprawling giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft (GAFAM) pose a threat to our digital lives.
Curious that they don't talk about browsers. Your browser sees everything and knows everything it wants to know about your online life, it's arguably the most sensitive piece of the puzzle. All major browsers except Firefox are owned by "GAFAM."
An important point. I've switched to Firefox (with uMatrix) for this very reason.
I can't yet bring myself to stop using Google. But I make a deliberate effort to not use their search when I don't have to:
- when I know exactly when I'm going, I rely on bookmarks and the browsers history or just type the URL in full.
- when my destination is a deep URL I use the method above to navigate to the website's homepage, and search using the builtin search (Wikipedia, IMdB).
- when all else fails, I Google.
The small decrease in productivity is more than made up by the warm feeling I get inside.
The arguments feel disingenuous. A start-up is much less likely able to fight a subpoena for user data. A start-up is much more likely to disappear. The only real case I see is an argument against ads, though I don't see any disclaimer that the service will then need to be a paid service.
Disclaimer: I work at a big company. I also worked at a small start-up in the past.
This is not a start-up, this is a non-profit association.
They do not want to have hundred of thousands of users. They are only trying to show that alternatives exist. They let you try them for free. And if you want and have the aptitudes, you can host the application on your own server.
Their alternative services appear to mostly be existing FOSS projects, re-branded...
Normally that would trouble me, but in this context... maybe a great idea! The uninitiated might have less trouble adopting "the frama suite" vs a dozen separate apps...
Granted, the GNU ecosystem should already provide that, but of course there are lots of good FOSS apps that don't and won't fly the GNU banner...
I haven't seen the GNU ecosystem provide anything at all in the web service space. GNU is, for the most part, the same set of applications that it was, say, 10 years ago. (Or at least I perceive it as such.)
I haven't really looked at what this start up is offering, but I want to point out that you can delete your user history, disable personalized advertising and disable tracking by Google by going to myactivity.google.com. I would encourage everyone who cares about this issue to do that. The only disadvantage that I have seen is that the maps app does not autocomplete past queries anymore. I would also recommend you install browser plugins that prevent tracking by other companies.
A point I also wanted to make is that contrary to popular opinion Google's business model is not build on collecting user data. Google actually makes most of it's money on search ads. These don't really require a lot of information about the user since advertisers are advertising to a specific query.
Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer.
Another disadvantage is that turning off "web and app activity" prevents useful features of Android Wear from functioning, e.g. setting reminders or receiving commute time notifications.
If it weren't for smartwatches I'd still be using Android with all account activity settings turned off (or "paused"), but instead I am reluctantly using an Apple Watch (and therefore an iPhone, unfortunately) and searching with DDG.
By the way, I'd happily pay for software with the ease of use and functionality of Google's location history browser if I could host it on my own server and keep all that location data to myself.
I used to think of Google as the nemesis of the open web, out of an instinct against monopolies and for the little guy. Now I'm thinking Facebook and others are much worse monopolies (though I always wonder who's using Facebook? Certainly not anyone I know below the age of 30).
Fb hasn't a reciprocal relationship with the web in the sense that it takes content from the web but doesn't give back. Best thing about Fb is that it's a good filter for people I choose not to care about, was what I was thinking. But now I believe the kind of communication going on in Fb is extremely detrimental, dangerous even, to an open society/democracy, because people with opposing views don't talk to each other but rather prefer to talk themselves into rage with like-minded people, and get fueled with fake news.
Needless to say, worse things happen in autocratic states.
It's only in Google's best interest the web doesn't become a scripted ghost town anymore than it already is. Therefore I don't understand what they want to accomplish with AMP.
I used to think that p2p is the future of the web, but eg. zeronet/ipfs don't help one bit with the above problems. Also, I don't want to cede the web; it was created by a whole generation of liberal-minded people.
Google should leverage their power for something big to counter web balkanization and echo chambers.
I love the reasons for doing something like this, and I'm personally really glad that people are investing time in trying to solve this problem.
That said, I think that one of the big mistakes that these initiatives make is trying to solve all of the problems that Google solves, under one roof. It's impossible. The only way Google is able to manage it is that they are an absolutely huge software organization. No free, or even smaller-but-still-not-open-source, alternative is going to be able to match the sheer number of services.
But I also don't think they have to. Instead it should be tackled in a decentralized way, which is much easier—one company or organization focusing on beating Google (or whichever monopoly) at exactly one of their products, by offering a better experience, or an equivalent experience with more freedom.
It makes me wonder whether a viable alternative approach as a consumer might be to use "best in class, but not necessarily FOSS" solutions from many different providers. For example, you could use...
- DuckDuckGo for search, an easy enough switch.
- Fastmail for email, which is very similar and an easy enough switch as well.
- Dropbox Paper for documents and notes, which is arguably a better, simple experience for most peoples's simple use cases.
- Microsoft Office365 for spreadsheets, since it's very hard for FOSS alternatives to be good and interoperable.
- Facebook for social messaging and events.
- Spotify for music.
- etc.
You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. At most you'd have to "rebalance" your portfolio when big acquisitions or shutdowns occur.
I'd be curious: If anyone is much more aware of privacy issues , could you weigh in on whether this approach would help? It might not help with government-actor spying, but it might help with lots of the other monopolistic issues?
> You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player.
But many of these companies are going to offer their services for free, which means advertising and you're right back to square one, except now your data is in the hands of someone completely unknown.
For me it's mostly the smartphone which is difficult to unlock. I use Ubuntu on my laptop, run my own web/mail/irc/etc servers, flashed all routers with OpenWRT... and it all made my experience better but Android with a Google Apps account is hard to beat. Say what you will about tracking and spying but it delivers.
Using FLOSS tools I can compete with Microsoft or TP-Link, not Google though.
Once again showing that Google is many orders of magnitude above companies like twitter, aol and facebook in terms of reach, revenue, influence, data and more importantly, algorithmic AI. Just take a look at the top 10 sites and apps on the net, most are controlled by Google, not twitter, aol or the next aol, facebook.
Well Google made a lot of money from ads. They invested heavily in infrastructure, engineers and buying whatever could enhance their reach. Android, Google docs, YouTube, Adclick. All insanely valuable acquisitions. Can't say the same about other big tech companies.
I'm as much a google/fb/microsoft "hater" as anybody. I waste countless hours trying to get a linux based workflow that doesn't create huge conflicts with getting my real work done (everyone else at work is on Windows). But despite my idealism, the pragmatic truth in my opinion is that commercial companies offer a product that to the completely none technical user, is FAR better than any "free as in freedom" product. Even looking at the link provided here, I clicked on it and immediately my reaction was "oh another freetard website." Until this kind of stuff has state of the art websites and user friendliness, it won't catch on with people who struggle to turn on a computer. And that happens to be the majority of people. Diaspora? My aunts and uncles would probably think they logged into the dark web when visiting that site (except they don't know what the dark web is).
I wish them good luck. I do use Google services and devices (written on a Pixel XL, and I use all the track my movements and usage options) because their AI suggestions and integrated features do make my life a tad easisr, but alternatives, especially open ones are never a bad thing.
It's quite possible to break the Internet by blanket-blocking core Google IPs[1]. I tried blocking these in my firewall and my surfing sessions became really slow. I would much prefer things like uBlock which do it at the browser level and it doesn't cause a lag.
This is usually because if you're resolving domains to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 in hosts then there is an inbuilt timeout as localhost is typically not running any services.
Best to make localhost run a service. A personal thing I use is lighthttpd[2] which ensures such a lag is vanished
Not to get too political, but I find the idea that the internet is better being decentralized and non-corporate to be the new Libertarianism. Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against such concepts as ideals, but in the end they are hard to implement in their pure form as the entire system gets larger and they aren't without consequence. An internet not dominated by Google, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, etc., sounds great because, well, screw the man, man! Let's go back to 1999(or better yet, the 80's so we can connect to dial-up BBSes for free by routing through a bunch of local numbers, because, screw the man!). I know I'm hyperbolizing here a little bit, but it seems silly and pointless. The vast majority of users don't want this.
> Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale?
Serious question: do you know anything about the history or workings of the Internet or the ARPANET? Or how email or HTTP works? Your understanding seems to be completely opposite to reality. It took a lot of effort for Google, MySpace, Facebook etc. to build centralized systems on a large scale to interoperate with the existing decentralized Internet, and for the amount of time and effort invested into them they do not actually work that well compared to the regular Internet.
In the unlikely case anyone is wondering, "publicity" is an incorrect calque from French where it means "advertising". So they are not saying that Google gets a lot of publicity, but that it pushes advertising.
Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so nice to use. It seems obtuse to just refuse to use a web service just because it happens to be made by Google.
> To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient.
How so? I don't use any Google services (even search) and don't feel the least bit inconvenienced. Microsoft's suite has those same things (Excel, Word, and OneNote are all available through a web page if that's your thing), translations are widely available (Bing and Dictionary.com), alternative maps (I like Here Maps, it even lets me download entire countries or regions for offline use), and so on. I must be the only person on the planet who doesn't like Gmail, so I'll just leave that one alone.
I'd say the "better-ness" of Google services these days is strictly the fact that everyone already uses them (which is critical for something like instant messaging). Individually they are (IMO) no better than most alternatives. Unless I'm real serious about a certain tool, the one I already have is the one I'm likely to start using - and most of the adult internet right now probably already has a Google account - and I'm pretty sure the kids are still signing up w/them, so no end in sight here...
>> "Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile."
I was Mac Mail and Mail on iPhone with 2 Gmail accounts and 1 Exchange/Office365 account. Works great and much better than having to switch between accounts in a browser. I've also always found the Gmail app on iOS awful to use (Inbox is quite good though).
>> No search engine can come close to Google.
DuckDuckGo comes very close in my opinion.
>> Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free.
My Mac/iPhone also come with a free calendar that's much nicer to use. I pay for Word rather than use Google Docs as I find it much nicer to use a desktop app than a web app.
Also - they don't exist to make our lives easier. They exist to collect our information and make Google more money.
>> Google Maps is kinda annoying
Agreed. UI has got worse of the years. I use Citymapper multiple times per day along with Apple Maps occasionally.
I still use Google services regularly but they certainly aren't the best at almost anything apart from search. They often come out on top because short term, they are free to the user. Long term maybe not so much.
> Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile.
Hum. I would not say "objectively".
I can't stand gmail, it does not come close to what I can do with Thunderbird
and K-9, and I'm not doing anything complex.
A webapp still can't compete with a native client.
> Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free.
Google services are not free, your privacy may be worth an app or two, but mine
sure isn't.
I'm giving a talk next week on how to get rid of Google so I would not say I'm being impartial here.
And I'd like to see that talk if you could, I'm still in the migration process of migrating off gmail. Its slow though as I have to change a ton of logins to use my own domain that gets stuff sent to fast mail. So nice having regular email on a domain I control.
At least on Android and the Google Maps app, when one requests mass transit directions, UberX is often given as a potential route. Gives a fare quote and a trip time, IIRC.
I recently reinstalled my system and didn't immediately install any AdBlock software, so for the first time in many years, I actually saw ads (that I noticed). I was surprised how relevant the ads actually were. They very clearly had an idea about what I had been researching the last couple of days. I think this is probably a good thing, if ads are supposed to be a necessary evil.
The biggest issue is user perception. Google does not want people to believe that their services are not private and secure. So offering a private and secure option does not work for the story they are trying to market.
Only a niche crowd would select this option, so the revenue they'd potentially gain is much less than what they put at risk with the change in messaging.
Hint: you window needs to be over 1020px for the page to actually work. Otherwise the actual content you get when clicking the map is hidden behind the map (I almost dismissed this, but noticed it by coincidence).
The map is adapted from the map in Astérix, a well-known comic in French.
The Gallic village (called the Librist Village on this map) is surrounded by Romans (proprietary software) -- and on this particular map, Roman cities are taken back by the Gallics.
I think it will be all fun and games untill someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up. Untill there is a personal price to pay no one really cares as the risks are theoritical.
Anyway since a significantly large number of software folks are actively working on creating and enabling these systems discussion in a software centric environment usually leads to handwaving and normalizing.
someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up
No they won't. Otherwise dictatorships wouldn't survive for very long. Most people do whatever they're told by whoever has power and think as little as possible.
a goal is not a strategy, and as other posters have pointed out, these offerings are Not Very Good. Nor has Frama invested much in making them accessible. For example, I am a big consumer of news, so I clicked on FramaNews...only to be taken to a page entirely in French.
Now I happen to know french, and like it, but most people....don't. And there wasn't much on the page anyway other than an exhortation to use RSS. If you can't be bothered to localize in even a few major languages, how am I supposed to be confident about the development of quality services? I agree wholeheartedly with the principle, but restricting myself to only using Free Software means I'm going to incur a major hit to my productivity, which is strategically stupid. I would be better off leveraging the capitalist establishment's tools against them to provoke change than sitting around waiting for for free software tools to catch up.
It depresses me that a lot of free software advocates don't seem to get or care how shitty their products are. I know, if you've spent ages working for nothing on a very complex software product it's infuriating to have some jackass like me come along and sneer at it. But a lot of Free software products are, well, broken. I use LibreOffice but I hate it, because of things like selecting a single paragraph for a formatting change only to have the paragraph before or after included in the format change as well. I get that making a WYSIWYG word processor is a truly massive software development undertaking, but what's the point if it doesn't work properly for even the most basic tasks? It's like a bicycle with the world's most incredible carbon-fiber frame where one of the wheels consistently falls off. I don't care how brilliantly engineered the thing is or how much work went into it or how great the sacrifices of the designers were; if the wheels fall off it's a shitty bicycle.
I am left-wing. I'm very much in favor of cooperative ventures, Free culture, mutuality, privacy, and all the other things the Frama people care about. I want to live in essentially the same kind of world they want to live in. I want to support this project....but I'm not going to, because my resources are too limited and using (most of) the tools they recommend might make my life better in theory but is definitely going to make it worse in practice.
tl;dr ain't nobody got time for that shit if it don't work right.
We're all economic and spiritual slaves now. Nothing will make a difference. All lights of hope will be stamped out when we get our one-world government. Have a great day!
Well, feel free to suggest some alternative that is as easy to use, because I don't read or speak French beyond that which is required to start a fight.
Google is starting to become dangerous not just in terms of how much data it's now collecting while killing privacy principles they used to abide by in their "don't be evil" days, but also because they now have a powerful lobbying machine, and that machine is slowly starting to turn against the "people".
When they fought against SOPA, they were an ally of the people, and they were on the right side of history. Now, they were one of the supporters of the TPP, and largely a rival of the people in this fight and on the wrong side of history, and they lost.
Google needs to start being on the side of the people, and the right side of history, once again, before it permanently tarnishes its reputation.
That's kind of the problem though; they usually _do_ offer a better user experience.
If we want users to start using open source software rather than walled garden solutions from large companies, we're going to have to start building open source solutions which offer a comparable user experience to proprietary ones from large companies; a difficult task to say the least.