My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil
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@xrksed: Thank you for your kind words. I agree with you. Privacy and security is not getting the attention it deserves. In particular I think tracking and targeting has gone way too far and we need regulation to fix that or even enforcing the laws that already exist.
With regards to making a phone, I would love to do so, but I think our focus needs to be on building the best browser in the world!
I use a lot of phones, to be frank. I like to test phones to see what the best phones have to offer, but also what less expensive phones have to offer. It is important when working on our mobile browser to think how we can provide a great experience across as many phones as possible.
Currently I am using a Huawei Mate 9 Pro and a Oppo N1 Mini, but I have been testing and using phones from Nokia, Sony, LG, Oppo, ZTE, Huawei, Samsung, MyPhone and a lot more. It is nice to see that you can get fairly cheap phones, less than $100, that are pretty good phones overall, nice screens, etc. There is still the privacy issue. I guess the best way to stay somewhat private is to keep different logins for each phone, but clearly that should not be needed and you are still tracked more than you should. Lets hope this will change.
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@nintoad: This is a lot more complicated than that my friend. Google is a monopoly in both search and advertising. When they block a company from advertising, it not only applies to their platform, which would be bad enough, but also all other sites that use the Google ad platform. I am sure you can see that is a problem. There is a lot of sites that use Google ads.
There are rules for monopolies for a reason, as it can be quite tempting for these companies to misuse their power, whenever they face competition of any kind. I hope Google will recognize that with great power comes great responsibility.
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@epipping: You are mixing things a bit my friend. Although I was co-founder and CEO of Opera, I am now co-founder and CEO of Vivaldi.
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@stevecarr123 Privacy and freedom are rights everyone should be afforded, not just Americans. And considering the internet is a global system, it is important that such "real world" rights are also applied here.
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@jon said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
@mossman: You are welcome to use your vivaldi.net mail account. We will be there. It is ad free and we do not scan your email.
Ah... But will you still be around in twenty years' time?
Since I've just spent a couple of months informing everyone of my Hotmail account I won't be switching to Vivaldi just yet. But I sincerely hope that in a couple more years Vivaldi looks healthy enough for me to make that change...
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@cqoicebordel I found the English option on the page you've sent but as far as I can tell the products themselves are only in French
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@xrksed: I would recommend buying some Android phone but flashing in another OS, like LineageOS and never connect it with any social media or Google.
The only problem would be installing apps, you would still need to install Play Store. And even then take care installing anything from there as Google does not check the apps.
Having a good hosts file will also help blocking trackers even from inside apps.
Edit: I forgot to add that you can also check a phone with Sailfish OS, it takes privacy quite serious. There are few phones that come out-of-box with it, but there are also some ROMs for other phones as well. A list might be available somewhere.
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@nintoad: A more accurate example would be explaining better how and what Google is. Google is actually one company under the Alphabet company, just like AdWords, Jigsaw, etc.
Think as you are the owner of two companies, one is a cereals company, producing cereals to food companies; the other is a transportation company, to transport your cereals as well as any other thing. Your cereals company holds 80% of all cereal in your area and your transportation company has 90% of your area. So you are a monopoly with both.
The small cereal companies in your region also need transportation for their cereals, but they are not as rich as you so they don't have their own transportation companies. Thus they need others to transport it. But as you are also the owner of the cereals company you just refuse to transport their cereals. But the other 10% of the transportation companies can't transport all the cereal those 20% small cereal companies have produced, so their produce just rot and they lose all the money they spent on growing those crops. You have just killed your competition only making you even bigger.
Using your example is as if McDonalds would buy meat processing companies and then refuse to sell meat to Burger King. And without meat there are no hamburgers and Burger King bankrupts.
In few words, Google is using one service/company to kill a competition of another service/company they have.
That's also not talking about the adverse effect tracking has that is not intentional.
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@cout: I love how you see percentage math.
Google Search ~ 65%
YouTube < 20% (Streaming)
Gmail < 30% (email provider)Also, none of these statistics are reliable because they only account the amount of traffic (not users) from the famous sites only. They don't count more obscure sites that still have millions of views, and summing all those obscure sites you can get billions of views. Google has, on an extremely optimistic view, 25% of the visible web. Their monopoly is on specific sectors, so, for example, they have probably around 60% of all search users.
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Just to add some more info, @jon was no longer Opera CEO when the above happened.
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@sage2000: If you use Google then you don't give any money to Vivaldi. To give any money to Vivaldi you need to have your default engine (in Vivaldi settings) to one of these:
- Ecosia
- Yahoo
- Bing
Then when you search in the address bar, or with selecting text and right-clicking or drag and drop, the URL will contain a token to tell you are a Vivaldi user.
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@jon: Jon, what about making Vivaldi for Sailfish OS?it would be a very good idea since you share the same privacy concerns
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@jon Yes, you should really try SailfishOS on the Sony Xperia X and compile vivaldi there. This also offers the option for security and privacy features beyond the browser.
BTW, Privacy needs more than tracking protection. The browser is the frontend here. We are actively researching this area in specialprivacy.eu to give users a good dashboard. We need an alternative to the brazen data collection without limits as the sole business model of the Web. It must be possible to have an economic activity without profiling everyone. Browsers have a very important role there. But the other browser makers are too deeply into making money with data to change anything. Microsoft resisted for a long time, but fell over with Windows 10 -
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@rigo better to build it with the j1 in mind, so when you will use it on sailfish x it will surely be an absolute blast :p
by the way, are you in the jolla telegram group?
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ACES BROWSER
THE UNSUNG WARMozilla
<<Here,Thunderbird. Allow Sortie!.>>Brave
βYES NOβAvant Force
<<Avant Browser. Sortie!>>Google
<<Google Chrome. Sortie!>>Microsoft
<<Microsoft Edge. Sortie!>>SeaMonkey Council
<<SeaMonkey. Sortie!>>However, in Windows -
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@gwen-dragon
Google owns Youtube and the demonatizing and blacklisting of content creators who do not fall in line with their social and political narratives is in fact censorship.
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You will pay for this blog Jon. There is plenty of evidence that Google is punishing anyone that criticizes them. If you dare to speak out about privacy issues or call them what they are (monopoly), Google will send you to oblivion.
The fact they can do this means they are a monopoly. Google can create a business online or destroy it. Vivaldi has to stay strong because the more Vivaldi grows its user base, the more Google will come after Vivaldi. And they do this with deception and lies. As Elon Musk once said, Google is the most dangerous company in the world now with their AI they are building to use our data. Data is the new oil and its precious.
People are not even aware how dumb they become by using Google because all your searches are narrowed to your thinking alone. It is like a big echo chamber. You can't believe how much more open and wise you become once you start using something else like DuckDuckGo with different results.
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@an_dz I'm using DDG, and sometimes StartPage, would either of those give money to Vivaldi?
I wouldn't use Bing or Yahoo, so is Ecosia as private as DDG/StartPage? Does it have good search results?
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@cqoicebordel said in My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil:
They removed their "don't be evil" policy.
They never had it to begin with. It was something of an unofficial motto people coined, never a self proclaimed intention, unfortunately.