> Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook
We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't have to choose between evils.
> The more "open" and "accessible" web, should be in their benefit, long term thinking.
An open Internet is only in the benefit of small and medium companies and startups.
Companies like Google have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal. All doors are open for them, all possible loopholes are within reach. When all else fails they can just drop a couple of billion $ and nobody can say no to that.
> > Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook
> We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't have to choose between evils.
This is very very slightly OT but I've asked this exact question within HN comments before and never really received any satisfactory answers...
Yes, I fully agree that it shouldn't and doesn't need to be a choice between the two sports teams, but even in a hypothetical world where it was, how on earth is anyone presuming that the infinitely pervasive Google is somehow more ok than the very opt-outable facebook?
Facebooks core service is a walled garden, Googles core service is a gateway into the open web. More to the point, as someone who was using the web before Google existed, Google Search specifically has helped me immeasurably over the years far more than anything Facebook has ever done.
I don't think I am, if we're forced to choose between "Evils" then I will choose the "evil" more aligned with my best interests. You didn't originally ask which of those companies was more virtuous merely why one would choose Google over Facebook, I would choose Google because its core business model revolves around helping me, Facebooks core business model revolves around entertaining me.
Not that I think either company is actually evil obviously.
> how on earth is anyone presuming that the infinitely pervasive Google is somehow more ok than the very opt-outable facebook?
The only way to "opt out" of either is to avoid Javascript and try blocking as many of their ad/beacon/tracker domains as possible; although that's a bit of a Hydra.
Yes, you can opt out from getting an account and using their applications; the worse part is all of the "shadow profiles" and third-party tracking which is pretty much everywhere these days :(
I've found it's easier to opt out of Google than of Facebook. The former is difficult because their products are relatively good (I consciously use a different browser, search engine, etc, but at the same time there's eg no competition in the field of mail clients), whereas the latter (including WhatsApp) is difficult due to the immense social pressure. I appreciate that far less.
You're not opting out of Google simply not using their service though. You're using Google invisibly just by visiting most major websites or by using a lot of (non-Google) software which integrate their services.
Facebook is mostly blockable on an individual basis, but Google really isn't. There are so many vectors:
- Google provides a geolocation service for applications to locate you by triangulating you relative to nearby wifi hardware. This sends data to Google about your devices wifi hardware and the ssids it detects. This isn't an in website feature, so normal content blocking doesn't help, it will be an application setting. Firefox and Safari both used to use this (Mozilla have now created a competing service).
- Google provides suspicious site screening services ("safe browsing" advisories) to many applications, including browsers.
- Google hosts most of the CT logs. I'm actually not 100% sure how the mechanism works here in detail, so this may eb a red herring, but it seems to be that browsers may periodically send a list of https sites you visited to these log servers to audit the certs for those sites
- Google provides free fast DNS which sends all of your DNS traffic to their servers. This may be set by the administrator of the network you're connecting through.
- Google analytics is used by many non-browser applications, and also in areas of the browser not covered by content blockers, e.g. Firefox's add-ons settings page.
- Many sites use Google js cdns and ajax apis for required functionality, so a content blocker will need to set whitelists to get the site to work.
- there are more such things, these are just examples
Facebook does none of the above.
Something like Decentraleyes will help with the cdns and a custom firewall, hosts file, filtering proxy or things like Little Snitch can help with some of the others but none of these are trivial.
In my eyes the CDN was the hard thing among those, as I'm not sure how many of them Decentraleyes manages to replace. Most of the others, though, are either blocked/not used for me, or used because I feel there are benefits (i.e. not through social pressure), namely the safe browsing advisories.
Gmail is good, but for personal email at least FastMail is better.
For example like many people here I have multiple acquired domains — for personal projects, plus I also devised a scheme for my online safety — I prefer for each online account I make to have its own email address.
FastMail does sub-domain aliasing by default, so if you have domain.com, you can make an email alias like me@domain.com and then you can use facebook@me.domain.com, google@me.domain.com, etc.
For one this allows you to keep spam in check and track its source. People say that Gmail's spam filters are really good, but that's not true. Gmail's spam filters are at the same time overly aggressive, with legitimate email ending up in the Spam folder far too often and doesn't do a good job at detecting optimized spam. E.g. when I was on Google Apps, my address was bombarded with email from "SEO specialists" that wanted to "optimize my website for HTML5" or other such crap. This is because I made the mistake of not protecting my domain with PrivacyGuard.
Another reason for unique email addresses are that they make the accounts more secure. If you find the email address that I use for Twitter, you won't necessarily know the email address I use for Facebook. It's like with passwords, the emails I use being in my 1Password (although due to the scheme used I remember them).
FastMail makes this very easy and natural. You can't do it with free Gmail obviously (it does plus aliasing, but that's shit). You can do it by configuring GSuite with complex email routing rules. But then the Gmail client itself will fight you, because you cannot configure a dynamic "From" address.
Also Gmail on mobile is polished and good, but not their website. If you ever find yourself on a device without a configured client on it, then FastMail's web client on mobile actually works and is very good.
And on iOS FastMail has been doing push notifications for some time. Don't know what deal they did with Apple, but you can use iOS's Mail client with push notifications via FastMail. I heard a rumor that iOS 11 finally fixed the Gmail integration to do push notifications. I have two work Gmail accounts on my phone and have seen no such evidence.
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Don't get me wrong, I like Google's products, but their superiority is overblown. I like FastMail more than I like Gmail and I use them both on a daily basis. And Dropbox is superior to Google Drive. Google Drive is simply shit that doesn't work and that I cannot trust with my files.
A lot of people here use Chrome. Well, I'm using Firefox and I think Firefox Quantum is now the superior browser.
I've been an Android user for a long time and I like Android's openness. However Android is really bad at privacy. I simply don't trust applications on Android, unless they are open source or from a very well known brand. Android also doesn't do Caldav and Carddav by default, you have to install apps from the Play store for it. But I find that to be unacceptable.
Google Docs is really good for collaborative editing, the best actually, however their spreadsheets quickly show their limits with big documents.
Google Hangouts is shit, nobody uses it and I'll never forgive them for killing their XMPP service in preference for the current Hangouts.
Google Maps is good, but don't go through Bulgaria with it because the coverage there is piss poor and you'll find yourself on really bad roads in the middle of nowhere. I noticed OpenStreetMaps is better in many parts of Europe.
Overall they fare well in quality, but superior they are not. Except for their search engine.
Eh, I'll give you that Google's products are not always superior, and that it's likely that the alternatives are better for use cases. However, when I _do_ use Google's products, it's mostly because I prefer them to the alternatives, not because people are bugging me to.
You're making the mistake of thinking that Facebook's dominion ends when you close the facebook.com tab.
- Facebook is tracking you over the whole web, building shadow profiles on everybody [1]
- Facebook is known to have conducted illegal and unethical experiments on manipulating people's emotions via the timeline. Let that sink in for a moment [2]
- Facebook is known to have had a partnership with Disqus for tracking users [3]
- Facebook is buying and aggregating user data from data brokers [4]
- Facebook now harvests the data of WhatsApp users as well, in spite of the app's original privacy policy [5]
- Facebook already knows your friends because it knows their address book [6]
- Facebook's tracking through Like buttons all across the web is violating EU law [7]
- Any of your friends can give Facebook access to your data [8]
We can go on btw, the web is filled with details of their past transgressions. I have no doubts about this — Facebook is one of the most immoral companies to have ever existed and time will prove me right.
And yes, Google has a lot of potential for abuse, but they haven't fucked up so badly yet. We don't need to guess how they compare, the evidence is right there.
I'm aware of all of this, but my point was that Google does exactly what you described, but on a much much more pervasive level that's almost impossible to opt out of.
Again, I'm not defending Facebook. I'm only stating that Google is worse terms of pervasive unavoidable tracking. What each of them do with that data (e.g. emotional manipulation) is an important, but slightly separate topic.
To address some of your references:
3 and 4 are real problems and probably the only thing you can never really opt out of with any provider.
8 is actually an old article on a feature since (thankfully) removed. However, even when it was there, it still only involved sharing data you had already volunteered to Facebook.
6 is aggregating data on who you are but not explicitly tracking, unless/until it's actually cross-referenced with 3 and 4, so isn't a problem in isolation
The rest are trivially blockable with any content blocker (some of which even come built in to some browsers these days)
The comparison with Facebook is because, yes, we're at a point of choosing which companies ethics you believe in most, and feel most comfortable handling your personal data. Privacy, security, openness, ads, ... at least it does to me.
And yes, I do think for any company out there crawling the web, RSS feeds are a good indicator. Ofcourse, Google algorithms got to the point that they don't really need RSS feeds anymore, but that's perhaps also the reason why quite often their search results kind of suck, as soon as you dive deeper.
The real problem, for all of us out here - is that no-one even bothers making a search engine anymore.
Everyone has given up. And Google can just do whatever they want. And that's exactly what they do.
Yep, with their infrastructure it's a much easier task to build something and take advantage of the scale in multiple ways, I believe GReader was a 20% time project too. I don't think any one has come close to matching the ease and scale that GReader operated at.
Sure their search has improved too, but it's pull instead of the push model that RSS is. The social networks are no substitutes, though Twitter comes closer than FB because it doesn't have to deal with my other network posts when trying to surface content I would be interested in.
Yeah DuckDuckGo is awesome. I have been using them exclusively for the past couple of months for search. In that time I have found their results as good as Google's results for the topics I cluster around.
We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't have to choose between evils.
> The more "open" and "accessible" web, should be in their benefit, long term thinking.
An open Internet is only in the benefit of small and medium companies and startups.
Companies like Google have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal. All doors are open for them, all possible loopholes are within reach. When all else fails they can just drop a couple of billion $ and nobody can say no to that.