My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil
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Cannot tell you how refreshing this article is, along with this article: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/jon-von-tetzchner-opera-facebook-google
One thing I'm finding lately is that privacy and security (but especially privacy) have taken a back-seat to everything else, and it's very concerning to me. It's not only been a concern for me in choosing a browser, but also now that I'm looking for a new phone; it seems there are absolutely no good options for a phone for those of us who care about our privacy. It makes me wish I had enough money, power, and knowledge of programming so I could just go out and start my own Google, Microsoft, or Apple, but one that truly has the consumers privacy and security at heart.
I'm curious, Jon, if you would tell me, what phone do you use? It's been stressing me out lately to find something that cares about my privacy, but is also easy-to-use, and provides a lot of comforts that many others enjoy.
New idea: VIVALDI PHONE! lol
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@paragon "I use Bing and Ecosia as my preferred two search engines
Regards from chilly Melbourne, Australia!"Curious, why Bing, rather than Startpage or DDG ?
Regards from somewhere also currently chilly & blowy, ~760 km from you
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A somewhat meta-comment...
I remain generally confounded & agog that ad-based or ad-prioritising companies exist, let alone prosper. I've never really comprehended it, but then i suppose that's because i'm clearly not in any of their demographics. Online, & in broadcast media, I:
- don't watch commercial tv, explicitly due to the ads, & the generally brain-dead shows designed for lowest common denominator sheep.
- ditto commercial radio.
- never see online ads, due to blockers
- never use farcebork or twatter
- abandoned Google search engine at least a decade ago, for DDG & sometimes Startpage.
- on the rare occasions when somehow some ad evades all the above measures, i still just visually &/or audiologically ignore it. My philosophy is simple; ads do not exist for my benefit, but for theirs, & their relationship with facts & truth is incidental if even extant.
- never use any online Google services like gmail, their doc thingies, etc, & indeed re gmail i actively try to persuade some of my regular correspondents to also abandon gmail for actual privacy-respecting services.
- even during those lean years post-O12 & pre-V, my only exposure to Chrome was very brief, just to discover how pathetic it was & be able to remove it from my shortlist of potential O12 replacements. Had there never been V, i'd still never have settled on Chrome as my default [or even alternative] browser.
Hence, having been a very early adopter [& fan] of the original Google search engine "back in the day", & admired their "do no evil / don't be evil" ethos, i became incrementally disenchanted & then horrified as i observed their descent into darkness over the years. It just beggars my belief that so many millions [or is it gazillions these days] of sheep around the world are so lazy & undiscerning that they sign over their souls to the devil, & become the product. Baa, baa...
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@ultraviolet: Thanks.
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@steffie: I find Bing to be more accurate than DuckDuckGo. As 'Just another mainstream search engine', I find Bing to be the lesser two evils.
I try using Ecosia as much as I can, and refer to Startpage whenever Bing lets me down.
Regards to you, dear fellow Aussie
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@javiergbarroso: Just try getting a straight answer from a Google Rep when using the Google Product Forums that hasn't been pre-scripted
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I use google apps (docs, sheets, the rest) every day. And always from Vivaldi. Could I get a clarification - is the browser I'm using having to hide its name from the server of those apps just so that I can use them?
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@aach1 Yes. Google blocks Vivaldi. So Vivaldi tells Google it's Chromium.
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@aach1 For me, whenever I go on any of the Google Drive services through Vivaldi, there's a message box at the bottom of the page that says "You are using an unsupported browser. If you see some unexpected behavior, you may want to use a supported browser instead. LEARN MORE"
It's kind of annoying and condescending. Other Chromium-based browsers, like Opera, aren't even listed on there as "supported browsers". I just click x to remove the message, but I have to do that every time I go into G-Drive.
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@d0j0p heh, word. I've never noticed that before. I'm going to check next time I use the Google Drive website and see what the page says
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@wyghthy There have been government actions against Google for monopoly and there is more than one lawsuit against them at present for the same thing.
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@cout said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
but if you were 90% of the web
Google doesn't provide 90% of Internet content, it's just search engine. No, YouTube doesn't hold 90% of streaming video market too.
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@an_dz: This...Exactly THIS!
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@niheiguilty said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
I used to use Opera Mail as my primary mail address [...] the service was ended and it was a chaos to migrate everything to another place, the sense of lost still hurts to this day.
My OperaMail account closed literally last week! When did you think the service ended?
I also just went through the pain of migrating mail provider since I had been using that OperaMail address as primary mail for nearly 25 years!!!
And, as you suggested, in the interests of longevity I plumped for the "old evil" - redirecting all contacts to my equally old Hotmail account (which I think I had to create to be able to chat to friends when it was all about MSN messenger). Figured that Microsoft are less able to harvest my info than Google these days...
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@rigo Hiya. Another Tumbleweeder, kool !!
Some time ago i did look at qwant.com & decided not to use it, but now i have no recollection why... so i need to now look again... thanks!
BTW, a couple of years ago didn't France bring in a version of the egregious US Patriot Act with similar onerous data retention & access laws?
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This is not surprising, though. Any more than the fact that oligopolies and monopolies are the natural end game in capitalism. When the responsibility for heinous acts is diluted among all the leadership of a big corporation, no one person feels responsibility. It's "the company" that's doing it, not the people who make the decision to actually do it, at least psychologically. Add in a heaping helping of profit motive and bonuses for people who screw others over extra hard and well, it's obvious that "Don't be evil" is just a noise.
It's meaningless in capitalism, especially if it's not codified and specified as to what that means. Don't discriminate against other browsers. Don't collect personal data beyond what you absolutely need. Don't use the personal data to make buttloads of cash in morally repugnant ways. Yes, that's all technically under "don't be evil", but the corporate leadership would no doubt file that under "being a savvy businessman". In capitalism, if we didn't have laws against grinding random babies into paste and selling it as health food, some corporation would no doubt try it when they really reached the pinnacle of their quest for money at all costs. That's just how it works in a competition-based society, where we equate money with freedom. The more money, the more freedom.
Any major corporation evolves over time into becoming a den of villains. That's just what the pressures of our society does. It's inevitable.
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@jon: you probably misuranderstood what i meant... i was talking about vivaldi giving the users a better web, and that's because google is giving us a bad one
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@cout said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
@ksx4system YouTube + Google + Gmail + $google service here ~= 90% of the web. Also love how THIS is your counterargument.
It's really not though... It might be what you GO TO 90% of the time, but the content passing through Google is mostly coming from elsewhere on the web.