Hacker News Reader

I'm currently trying to cut Google, Facebook and the other gargantuan major players out of my online life, and move to smaller, more specialized providers. If nothing else, it gives me a bit of peace of mind that my online assets are not all in one basket. If you're 100% Google, what are you going to do if the big G decides to suspend your account? If all your social life is though FB (or other big social network), what happens if they suspend your account?

My FB usage is now scaled down to basically just an event RSVP service with a few token page subscriptions for bands and venues. I've removed all photos and videos, cleared out all profile information, set visibility on everything to "just me" or "friends only", and I've untagged myself from everything I was ever tagged in. Yes, I know FB is probably keeping a lot (all?) of that in their archives for an indeterminate period of time, maybe the EU "right to be forgotten" can help with that.

I've replaced Google search with Startpage and I've migrated my email, calendar and contacts from GMail/GCalendar to a paid hosting/email provider, with my own personal domain name.

My phone is still running stock Android 7, but I've significantly cut down the amounts of apps installed, I much prefer to use web versions in Firefox with a decent lineup of privacy-protecting and tracking-inhibiting extensions. Some mobile web sites are really shitty about forcing their apps on you, but I'd rather just do without them. Obviously on the desktop, Firefox with the appropriate extensions is the browser of choice.

I refuse to get any "smart" devices, they're not welcome in my home. I'm working on replacing my Chromecasts, if nothing else I'll just use my laptop and an HDMI cable. For music in my kitchen/bathroom/basement, I've got a decent BT speaker instead.

Kicking the Google/FB/whatever dependency is hard.

It makes you wonder how people managed to survive at all 20 years ago!

Probably with a lot less stress.

I feel you. My present behaviour is similarly full of contradictions - I avoid new solutions that are not self-hosted and despise most SaaS services, vastly preferring off-line alternatives, and yet all my mail goes through GMail, and most IM conversations go through Facebook Messenger.

I guess part of the reason is I started using GMail, Google Maps and Facebook long before I developed my cynicism towards our market reality[0]. It's way too much effort to drop GMail now, Google Maps are way too convenient, and most of my real-life acquaintances are on Facebook.

But I strongly avoid introducing any new SaaS and other spyware software in my life now.

--

[0] - I should say "cynicism towards tech industry", but it's not really about technology per se - it's about regular market incentives that fuck up everything, regardless of the technology involved.

Yours seems to follow the pattern of invading "private" spaces?

i.e. you are very protective of information about the inside of your house: floor plan, temperatures. Makes sense considering it's your home).

Seems like the same thing with the car, though. It seems like you think of the inside of the car or the workings of the car as a more private space than where the car has gone?

Emails and Hangouts conversations are harder to pin down. Could be that they are more abstract and harder to maintain a concept of private vs public spaces on the internet? Could also be that there aren't really any alternatives that provide an obvious privacy benefit for their cost/effort.

If privacy is important to you, I can recommend kolabnow.com as an email/calendar provider. It is a bit more clunky than the slickness of GMail/GCalendar, but their software stack is all open source (they're behind the Kolab groupware package), and they take privacy very seriously. Their servers are hosted in Switzerland, which has some of the strongest legal protections in the world, in regards to privacy.

Less than $15/month for full-featured IMAP email and groupware for an individual. Is it super cheap? No. But you can't argue with their privacy track record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolab_Now

(I'm not affiliated, in fact I migrated from them to a different provider that also does web hosting. But I was very satisfied while I was a customer)

Thanks for the suggestion!

My email for my custom domain is on FastMail, but I have a couple of gmail addresses that would take a long time to get fully migrated over.

The company I work for also uses GSuite, so I can't really escape it, anyway...

<< You'll never get me to install one of those telemetry devices in the OBD port on my car for any company. I don't care how much money it will save me on my phone or insurance plan.

Totally agree. I don't feel like it would be 'saving' money either.