10 ms·

> “Some new features for your Google account.” Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever." How does one not be herded like cattle by the corp

> “Some new features for your Google account.” Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever." How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?

jsingleton 10y ago
Use alternatives? For example, https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com for search.
- _nalply 10y ago
  Has DuckDuckGo email and an app suite?
  - akerro 10y ago
    tutanota, protonmail, fastmail, scrypmail. If Google is part of your life, it's too late for you.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Just switched to FastMail this past weekend, and I recommend it. For an app suite, I recommend Sandstorm.io.
    - yojex 10y ago
      Could you explain your use case with Sandstorm? I find their homepage to be ambiguous/not really sure what they're offering.
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        Yeah, so I do all my documents and spreadsheets and stuff on Sandstorm Oasis, which is their managed offering. I can do a bunch of other stuff on it, and it's easiest to figure out the extent of it by just trying the demo yourself (https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io) and checking out the apps and stuff. But in my case, I mostly use it like I used Google Docs and Trello before, that I can easily control my data on, and migrate to a self-hosting solution easily later. Sometimes it's hard to explain Sandstorm because they have a wide variety of good use cases for it, and there's really not a lot of comparable software packages to it. (It's like ownCloud but it's not like ownCloud, it's like Docker but it's not at all like Docker, etc.)
        ifhs 10y ago
        Curious: why use the managed hosting if you are a privacy enthusiast? Or are you just a sandstorm enthusiast? Why? Became nits not Google? Just curious since your every comment is about it...and it looks like you are wearing Google glass...
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        Heh, the Glass picture is really old. I used to be quite the Google fan, a few years back. Then I paid a bit more attention to the cost, and have been moving away since. The managed hosting for Sandstorm is a good step in the direction, because it's very easy to me to move between Sandstorm servers, but I'm not super confident on running my own right now, and it's still in early development as a platform. But Sandstorm on their servers runs the same as Sandstorm on mine, and unlike leaving Google, where I have to figure out how to transplant my data from their proprietary apps to other apps, I can move my apps and data perfectly between Sandstorm servers. I do place a high degree of trust in Kenton Varda (founder of Sandstorm.io) specifically to keep Sandstorm doing what they should. If I ever feel that trust is misplaced (and I keep a close eye), I'll move.
    - jsingleton 10y ago
      I've heard good things about both https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com and https://protonmail.com https://protonmail.com so would be good to hear your experiences after a bit more use.
      - newscracker 10y ago
        Recently I started a "paper evaluation" of paid, privacy protecting (to a good extent) email services. I found Fastmail to be quite expensive if one needs multiple accounts. Providers like Protonmail and Tutanota don't support IMAP or any other way to download mails (the web interface and apps are the only choices). That makes it very difficult (or impossible?) to move to another service and take one's older mails along. Protonmail does not support custom domains, whereas Tutanota does. The cheapest solutions I like currently are posteo.de and mailbox.org. I have not started using either of them, but plan to move soon. Posteo does not support custom domains (it is heavily privacy focused and refrains from collecting or storing customer data as much as possible). So your only choice is to use one of many posteo.x domains for the email address. On the other hand, mailbox.org supports custom domains. Both support IMAP, web mail, migrating email from other providers, etc. Both these services and their websites are worth a look, IMO.
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        Yeah, ProtonMail was the other one I considered, but the price for storage wasn't nearly as compelling, and both had reasonably strong privacy stories. And now that I'm in FastMail, I'm really amazed at the flexibility and control it gives you, especially with connecting your own domain and stuff. Back in the day, Gmail's driving appeal was it's pro features, and I'd argue that FastMail makes Gmail look basic. Also, I've opened two support tickets this week to ask questions and got responses within an hour or two.
        lostforest 10y ago
        ProtonMail lost any cred when they paid to have some perps stop DDOsing them. Have their engineers or their Web host never heard of blackhole routing? Smart router engineers know about the concept of blackhole routing offensive traffic. It takes a couple of minutes and it works wonders.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    Why does your search engine need to provide email? The two are pretty unrelated.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    Do you want them to? So they can eventually turn into Google? Diversify and avoid cloud apps and closed source applications as much as possible.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    No, and that's a feature. Google's path to the dark side hit a major milestone with Gmail, and the fact that you now had a reason to personally and identifiably log in to your search engine provider. No, no, no, nope, fucking bloody hell no! I'm thinking it's hard time to give https://Sandstorm.io https://Sandstorm.io a really good looking at.
- problems 10y ago
  Unfortunately their results are pretty abysmal. https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ or ixquick is a better option in terms of results.
  - inanutshellus 10y ago
    I've used them for years now and their search is rarely insufficient. When it is, I make my search more specific or I hop over to another engine for that specific search. Really, I just like using products of companies that try to do "the right thing". Anything from the Mozilla Foundation and DuckDuckGo are two examples. I'd say I do a Google search once or twice a month.
    - chillingeffect 10y ago
      Same here. Been "ducking" for years now. I used to go to google when I couldn't find stuff on ddg, but lately I've noticed if it's not on ddg, it's not on google, either! I'd say about 1% of 1% of the time I find something on google that I couldn't find on google.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    DDG has been my preferred search for years. I'd tried it pre-Snowden, off-and-on. Since Snowden or before it's been fully acceptible: 1. Results close to as good if not better than Google. 2. No tracking. 3. Bang searches. With the "too clever by half" search dialogs many sites are implementing (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Google Ngram Viewer) it's often superior to the native on-site search as I don't have to set focus 2-4 times to actually type in the bloody search dialog. 4. No tracking. 5. Did I mention no tracking? 6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage. 7. Search customisations -- light page (good for console and commandline search), night mode, and others. 8. Unmangled URLs. I can copy/paste URLs straight from DDG. No-can-do with Google.
    - grzm 10y ago
      > 6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage. Or even Google. I've seen comments online about DDG providing only an illusion of privacy. I haven't dug into this deeply. From what I've read this comes down to DDG (including bang searches like !g and !sp) stripping identifying information, which provides protection from tracking by entities like advertisers and social networks, but not law enforcement or agencies like the NSA that may have legal options or extralegal access. Is my understanding generally correct? Any corrections/additions/clarifications appreciated.
- clydethefrog 10y ago
  And if their search engine does not deliver what you're looking for, use the bang !sp to use Startpage, a search engine that fetches results from the Google search engine but does not give any personal user information to Google's servers. Startpage's servers are in the Netherlands.
  - jsingleton 10y ago
    Simply !s works too.
hackuser 10y ago
> How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it? Legal protection is necessary, and that's what works in other industries. It's not a fair negotiation, between a company's teams of engineers, management, and attorneys on one side, and a lone individual on the other. Financial firms, for example, can't just put whatever they want in agreements or do whatever they want. EDIT: The solution of informed consent doesn't work. Consumers don't have time to become informed, which requires not only reading every click-wrap agreement but understanding the technology (remember the solution must work for all users, not only the HN crowd but people who don't know what a web browser is), and understanding privacy and its consequences, and then starting that process over again to find an alternative that meets their needs - for every technology in the stack. It's unrealistic in theory, and in practice obviously doesn't work: Almost nobody, even the HN crowd, is informed.
- __jal 10y ago
  People need to start thinking of web forms, solicitations for email address, etc. like people used to think of the Columbia House record/CD club. There may be an instant-gratification payoff, but you'll regret it at leisure. Or, would you take a free sample to munch on if they first presented you with a 34-page legal agreement?
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    People rarely regretted joining Columbia House, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here. They really did give you a billion records for a penny, and all you had to do was opt out every month (or opt in, they had a lot of really good records in that catalog in the 90s at least.) They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models. http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-explain-shady-math-be-219964 http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-e...
    - __jal 10y ago
      I'm sure there were more than one person who liked it, so yes, I suspect it is true to say 'people' rarely regretted it. I know I did, when I joined them on a lark in college. They were literally a joke (several, actually) at the time. Consumer reports was overflowing with complaints. The only people I knew who didn't regret it were the ones who were cheating. > They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models. I understand that others see things differently, and if you liked them, great for you. But businesses who rely on customers making mistakes about their own best interests are slime, in my view, and in that of many others.
akerro 10y ago
Just don't have Google account and clean cookies and history regularly[1], forbid saving 3rd party cookies (built-in in Firefox) and noise your canvas generator [2], block 3rd party JS, CSS, media and fonts [3], control your referals your browser sends on each click [4] use VPN or Tor on startup. You don't need to bother with those tools, they will just work in background (µBlock requires some configuration). [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/expire-history-by-days/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/expire-histor... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fingerprinting/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fin... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... [4] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/refcontrol/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
- oridecon 10y ago
  My Google account only runs in a separate browser. But I still do the things you mentioned (privacytools.io). For YouTube I'm using a RSS reader (no account) through a 3rd-party but I think they can still easily identify me. I hope I can fully remove Google from my life in a few years.
- artificial 10y ago
  Excellent list, here's one you may not know about which locally hosts 3rd party libraries (such as jQuery) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes... to plug that hole while restoring some enhanced functionality. This alone got me back on Firefox.
- godshatter 10y ago
  I've also found it helps to use different Firefox profiles for different things, like hobbies, going to banks, going to anything google, programming stuff, etc. I have noscript, umatrix, and ghostery installed on each profile. I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but there is a Firefox command-line switch to bring the profile manager up when run.
Torn 10y ago
Google do provide a privacy checkup screen where you can review and tweak your settings: https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/1 https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/1 And you can opt out of ads here https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated
bitJericho 10y ago
Start paying for your services from companies that exist by charging. Don't do business with ad companies.
- amelius 10y ago
  Any good search engines in the paid space?
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    Nope!
- jasonvorhe 10y ago
  Yeah, get a G-Suite account and you're free from Google using your data for advertising purposes.
wincy 10y ago
Well, my wife and I just ordered dumb phones and an AWS 2FA key fob (remember those?) which will be here this weekend, we're selling all our screens except one family PC. I sold off my Oculus Rift and gaming PC a month ago. We're going to have to buy a flashlight, GPS or maybe just a map book, calculator, a CD player, a Blu-Ray burner, a day planner, a wristwatch, a kitchen timer, get a library card, a shared calendar on the wall, and we'll go from there. I'm excited but also nervous about it. A few months ago I spent 90% of my free time staring at a screen. I yelled at my wife if god forbid she wanted to spend time with me and not just shut up and watch whatever video game I was playing. I figure it's a start.
- nacnud 10y ago
  Please write this up in a few months to share your experiences.
  - wincy 10y ago
    That's my plan. I'm hoping to find other people in my city (Kansas City) that want to start down a similar path. I want to write more but I'm at work and really need to get a few hours of productivity in today. I'll make sure to keep track of my experiences though!
- arkitaip 10y ago
  I admire your dedication and would be interested in hearing more about your experiment in the future. Maybe some kind of update in the future here on HN?
  - inanutshellus 10y ago
    Sounds like they're trying to save their marriage after "screen addiction" became a problem. I had the same problem with video games. I ended up swearing off video games that didn't have an ending and have been all the better for it.
    - wincy 10y ago
kuschku 10y ago
I got the screen today: http://i.imgur.com/HClXUy3.png http://i.imgur.com/HClXUy3.png It only tells you that it will actually result in less privacy if you scroll down and read the fine print. That’s seriously misleading.
omouse 10y ago
Class action lawsuits.

jsingleton 10y ago

Use alternatives? For example, https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com for search.

_nalply 10y ago
Has DuckDuckGo email and an app suite?
- akerro 10y ago
  tutanota, protonmail, fastmail, scrypmail. If Google is part of your life, it's too late for you.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Just switched to FastMail this past weekend, and I recommend it. For an app suite, I recommend Sandstorm.io.
  - yojex 10y ago
    Could you explain your use case with Sandstorm? I find their homepage to be ambiguous/not really sure what they're offering.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Yeah, so I do all my documents and spreadsheets and stuff on Sandstorm Oasis, which is their managed offering. I can do a bunch of other stuff on it, and it's easiest to figure out the extent of it by just trying the demo yourself (https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io) and checking out the apps and stuff. But in my case, I mostly use it like I used Google Docs and Trello before, that I can easily control my data on, and migrate to a self-hosting solution easily later. Sometimes it's hard to explain Sandstorm because they have a wide variety of good use cases for it, and there's really not a lot of comparable software packages to it. (It's like ownCloud but it's not like ownCloud, it's like Docker but it's not at all like Docker, etc.)
      - ifhs 10y ago
        Curious: why use the managed hosting if you are a privacy enthusiast? Or are you just a sandstorm enthusiast? Why? Became nits not Google? Just curious since your every comment is about it...and it looks like you are wearing Google glass...
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        Heh, the Glass picture is really old. I used to be quite the Google fan, a few years back. Then I paid a bit more attention to the cost, and have been moving away since. The managed hosting for Sandstorm is a good step in the direction, because it's very easy to me to move between Sandstorm servers, but I'm not super confident on running my own right now, and it's still in early development as a platform. But Sandstorm on their servers runs the same as Sandstorm on mine, and unlike leaving Google, where I have to figure out how to transplant my data from their proprietary apps to other apps, I can move my apps and data perfectly between Sandstorm servers. I do place a high degree of trust in Kenton Varda (founder of Sandstorm.io) specifically to keep Sandstorm doing what they should. If I ever feel that trust is misplaced (and I keep a close eye), I'll move.
  - jsingleton 10y ago
    I've heard good things about both https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com and https://protonmail.com https://protonmail.com so would be good to hear your experiences after a bit more use.
    - newscracker 10y ago
      Recently I started a "paper evaluation" of paid, privacy protecting (to a good extent) email services. I found Fastmail to be quite expensive if one needs multiple accounts. Providers like Protonmail and Tutanota don't support IMAP or any other way to download mails (the web interface and apps are the only choices). That makes it very difficult (or impossible?) to move to another service and take one's older mails along. Protonmail does not support custom domains, whereas Tutanota does. The cheapest solutions I like currently are posteo.de and mailbox.org. I have not started using either of them, but plan to move soon. Posteo does not support custom domains (it is heavily privacy focused and refrains from collecting or storing customer data as much as possible). So your only choice is to use one of many posteo.x domains for the email address. On the other hand, mailbox.org supports custom domains. Both support IMAP, web mail, migrating email from other providers, etc. Both these services and their websites are worth a look, IMO.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Yeah, ProtonMail was the other one I considered, but the price for storage wasn't nearly as compelling, and both had reasonably strong privacy stories. And now that I'm in FastMail, I'm really amazed at the flexibility and control it gives you, especially with connecting your own domain and stuff. Back in the day, Gmail's driving appeal was it's pro features, and I'd argue that FastMail makes Gmail look basic. Also, I've opened two support tickets this week to ask questions and got responses within an hour or two.
      - lostforest 10y ago
        ProtonMail lost any cred when they paid to have some perps stop DDOsing them. Have their engineers or their Web host never heard of blackhole routing? Smart router engineers know about the concept of blackhole routing offensive traffic. It takes a couple of minutes and it works wonders.
- stephenr 10y ago
  Why does your search engine need to provide email? The two are pretty unrelated.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Do you want them to? So they can eventually turn into Google? Diversify and avoid cloud apps and closed source applications as much as possible.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  No, and that's a feature. Google's path to the dark side hit a major milestone with Gmail, and the fact that you now had a reason to personally and identifiably log in to your search engine provider. No, no, no, nope, fucking bloody hell no! I'm thinking it's hard time to give https://Sandstorm.io https://Sandstorm.io a really good looking at.
problems 10y ago
Unfortunately their results are pretty abysmal. https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ or ixquick is a better option in terms of results.
- inanutshellus 10y ago
  I've used them for years now and their search is rarely insufficient. When it is, I make my search more specific or I hop over to another engine for that specific search. Really, I just like using products of companies that try to do "the right thing". Anything from the Mozilla Foundation and DuckDuckGo are two examples. I'd say I do a Google search once or twice a month.
  - chillingeffect 10y ago
    Same here. Been "ducking" for years now. I used to go to google when I couldn't find stuff on ddg, but lately I've noticed if it's not on ddg, it's not on google, either! I'd say about 1% of 1% of the time I find something on google that I couldn't find on google.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  DDG has been my preferred search for years. I'd tried it pre-Snowden, off-and-on. Since Snowden or before it's been fully acceptible: 1. Results close to as good if not better than Google. 2. No tracking. 3. Bang searches. With the "too clever by half" search dialogs many sites are implementing (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Google Ngram Viewer) it's often superior to the native on-site search as I don't have to set focus 2-4 times to actually type in the bloody search dialog. 4. No tracking. 5. Did I mention no tracking? 6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage. 7. Search customisations -- light page (good for console and commandline search), night mode, and others. 8. Unmangled URLs. I can copy/paste URLs straight from DDG. No-can-do with Google.
  - grzm 10y ago
    > 6. Proxy bang searches, e.g., StartPage. Or even Google. I've seen comments online about DDG providing only an illusion of privacy. I haven't dug into this deeply. From what I've read this comes down to DDG (including bang searches like !g and !sp) stripping identifying information, which provides protection from tracking by entities like advertisers and social networks, but not law enforcement or agencies like the NSA that may have legal options or extralegal access. Is my understanding generally correct? Any corrections/additions/clarifications appreciated.
clydethefrog 10y ago
And if their search engine does not deliver what you're looking for, use the bang !sp to use Startpage, a search engine that fetches results from the Google search engine but does not give any personal user information to Google's servers. Startpage's servers are in the Netherlands.
- jsingleton 10y ago
  Simply !s works too.

hackuser 10y ago

> How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it? Legal protection is necessary, and that's what works in other industries. It's not a fair negotiation, between a company's teams of engineers, management, and attorneys on one side, and a lone individual on the other. Financial firms, for example, can't just put whatever they want in agreements or do whatever they want. EDIT: The solution of informed consent doesn't work. Consumers don't have time to become informed, which requires not only reading every click-wrap agreement but understanding the technology (remember the solution must work for all users, not only the HN crowd but people who don't know what a web browser is), and understanding privacy and its consequences, and then starting that process over again to find an alternative that meets their needs - for every technology in the stack. It's unrealistic in theory, and in practice obviously doesn't work: Almost nobody, even the HN crowd, is informed.

__jal 10y ago
People need to start thinking of web forms, solicitations for email address, etc. like people used to think of the Columbia House record/CD club. There may be an instant-gratification payoff, but you'll regret it at leisure. Or, would you take a free sample to munch on if they first presented you with a 34-page legal agreement?
- pessimizer 10y ago
  People rarely regretted joining Columbia House, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here. They really did give you a billion records for a penny, and all you had to do was opt out every month (or opt in, they had a lot of really good records in that catalog in the 90s at least.) They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models. http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-explain-shady-math-be-219964 http://www.avclub.com/article/four-columbia-house-insiders-e...
  - __jal 10y ago
    I'm sure there were more than one person who liked it, so yes, I suspect it is true to say 'people' rarely regretted it. I know I did, when I joined them on a lark in college. They were literally a joke (several, actually) at the time. Consumer reports was overflowing with complaints. The only people I knew who didn't regret it were the ones who were cheating. > They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models. I understand that others see things differently, and if you liked them, great for you. But businesses who rely on customers making mistakes about their own best interests are slime, in my view, and in that of many others.

akerro 10y ago

Just don't have Google account and clean cookies and history regularly[1], forbid saving 3rd party cookies (built-in in Firefox) and noise your canvas generator [2], block 3rd party JS, CSS, media and fonts [3], control your referals your browser sends on each click [4] use VPN or Tor on startup. You don't need to bother with those tools, they will just work in background (µBlock requires some configuration). [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/expire-history-by-days/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/expire-histor... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fingerprinting/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fin... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... [4] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/refcontrol/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

oridecon 10y ago
My Google account only runs in a separate browser. But I still do the things you mentioned (privacytools.io). For YouTube I'm using a RSS reader (no account) through a 3rd-party but I think they can still easily identify me. I hope I can fully remove Google from my life in a few years.
artificial 10y ago
Excellent list, here's one you may not know about which locally hosts 3rd party libraries (such as jQuery) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes... to plug that hole while restoring some enhanced functionality. This alone got me back on Firefox.
godshatter 10y ago
I've also found it helps to use different Firefox profiles for different things, like hobbies, going to banks, going to anything google, programming stuff, etc. I have noscript, umatrix, and ghostery installed on each profile. I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but there is a Firefox command-line switch to bring the profile manager up when run.

Torn 10y ago

Google do provide a privacy checkup screen where you can review and tweak your settings: https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/1 https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup/1 And you can opt out of ads here https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated

bitJericho 10y ago

Start paying for your services from companies that exist by charging. Don't do business with ad companies.

amelius 10y ago
Any good search engines in the paid space?
- bitJericho 10y ago
  Nope!
jasonvorhe 10y ago
Yeah, get a G-Suite account and you're free from Google using your data for advertising purposes.

wincy 10y ago

Well, my wife and I just ordered dumb phones and an AWS 2FA key fob (remember those?) which will be here this weekend, we're selling all our screens except one family PC. I sold off my Oculus Rift and gaming PC a month ago. We're going to have to buy a flashlight, GPS or maybe just a map book, calculator, a CD player, a Blu-Ray burner, a day planner, a wristwatch, a kitchen timer, get a library card, a shared calendar on the wall, and we'll go from there. I'm excited but also nervous about it. A few months ago I spent 90% of my free time staring at a screen. I yelled at my wife if god forbid she wanted to spend time with me and not just shut up and watch whatever video game I was playing. I figure it's a start.

nacnud 10y ago
Please write this up in a few months to share your experiences.
- wincy 10y ago
  That's my plan. I'm hoping to find other people in my city (Kansas City) that want to start down a similar path. I want to write more but I'm at work and really need to get a few hours of productivity in today. I'll make sure to keep track of my experiences though!
arkitaip 10y ago
I admire your dedication and would be interested in hearing more about your experiment in the future. Maybe some kind of update in the future here on HN?
- inanutshellus 10y ago
  Sounds like they're trying to save their marriage after "screen addiction" became a problem. I had the same problem with video games. I ended up swearing off video games that didn't have an ending and have been all the better for it.
  - wincy 10y ago

kuschku 10y ago

I got the screen today: http://i.imgur.com/HClXUy3.png http://i.imgur.com/HClXUy3.png It only tells you that it will actually result in less privacy if you scroll down and read the fine print. That’s seriously misleading.

omouse 10y ago

Class action lawsuits.